The Turning World
by wildskysong
Summary: "Go away," she says harshly, because she can't have him here, not after all this time.  He smiles and says he can't.  Phillipa Cobb, fourteen years in the future.  Inception bang fic.  Gen, slight Arthur/Eames.  Lots and lots of swearing.
1. part i

**My Inception big_bang fic- the MONSTER. It will be moved to Archive of Our Own shortly, as soon as I get an account there. :) **

**Based on an idea given to me by Ashley. **

**A thousand thank yous to paintedsongs for her wonderful, wonderful art and encouragement (link at my profile) and to iheartfluffy, Crystal, and Molly for the betaing and the support. **

**This one's for you guys!**

**Disclaimer: Inception is not mine. It's Christopher Nolan's. _Burnt Norton _is not mine either. It belongs to Mr. T.S. Elliot, whom I adore. **

* * *

Part I

_Time present and time past  
Are both perhaps present in time future,  
And time future contained in time past.  
If all time is eternally present  
All time is unredeemable. _

* * *

One

_What might have been is an abstraction  
Remaining a perpetual possibility  
Only in a world of speculation. _

_My brother is a fucking art thief_, Phillipa Cobb thought, glaring at the wall of the police station. _I am going to fucking _kill_ him._

The policemen and FBI agents at the station kept shooting her almost accusing glances, as if to say _it's your fault that your brother is seventeen and a fucking criminal mastermind. _

It wasn't her fault, really. She had tried to raise him right, to teach her baby brother the concepts of morality and right and wrong and that stealing is bad.

Unfortunately, morality didn't seem to stick to James Cobb.

Which was why Phillipa was sitting in a police station, muttering under her breath, plotting the best way to kill her baby brother. Slowly. With a spoon.

"Ma'm," one of the FBI agents (he was dressed too nicely to be a cop) approached her, his face carefully blank. "Are you sure you have no idea where your brother is?"

"Yes, I'm sure," she replied flatly. "If I knew where he was, I'd tell you."

The look the man gave her clearly said that he—Special Agent Matt Jefferson, according to the credentials he has clutched in one hand—didn't believe her.

That was okay. Phillipa didn't believe herself either.

She smiled at him, pulling her lips back. She intended it to be interpreted as a reassuring smile, a good-citizen smile. It probably came off as a crazy-person smile, though, because Phillipa wasn't really great at the whole interaction thing, and more often than not she came across as one of those socially awkward types, the ones who were smart but not equipped to deal with people.

And again, that was okay. She didn't really like people.

"Is there anywhere that he would go?" Agent Jefferson pressed, his silly moustache twitching. Phillipa tried not to laugh in his face.

"Nope."

"He doesn't have a safe house? A friend willing to let him crash on a couch for a few nights? A car, anything?"

Phil tucked her hair behind an ear. "He's got a car," she said.

Agent Jefferson's moustache quirked up with excitement. "What's the model?"

"I dunno," she told him, perfectly deadpan. "He steals a new one every week or so."

Agent Jefferson looked like he was about to have a heart attack.

Phillipa wondered what that would look like.

"Do you have any relatives other than your grandparents?" He ground out, his face an interesting shade of red.

"Did you read the file?"

Agent Matt Jefferson closes his eyes and ground his teeth. "Yes."

"There's your answer."

"Who is Uncle Arthur?"

Phillipa blinked, startled—she'd been expecting questions about her parents, her grandparents. Cops always talked about them, as if all of James' problems could be traced back to the previous generation.

According to genetics, they could, but that was beside the point.

"He's not our really uncle," she said, automatically. She was surprised—Arthur had never been mentioned before, so where did Moustache here get that information?

"Who is he then?"

Phillipa eyed him warily. "Friend of Dad's," she murmured, deciding to play nice with Special Agent Jefferson, for a little while at least.

"Your father has been in a coma for fourteen years."

"Really? I didn't notice."

"Why is a friend of your father's still hanging around, fourteen years after his… accident?"

"Maybe 'cause he feel obligated? He's weirdly loyal like that."

"How often do you see 'Uncle' Arthur?"

"Whenever he decides to drop in. Once or twice a year, usually. It was more often when James and I were kids, but now we can take care of ourselves, so…"

"What does he look like?"

"Like he stepped out of a '30s movie."

Agent Jefferson glared, still gritting his teeth. "Miss Cobb—" He started.

"No, seriously. Three-piece suit, slicked-back hair, pocket watch, the whole thing."

"Any physical characteristics?"

Phillipa paused, chewed her lip. "Tall, skinny, dark hair, dark eyes, early-to-mid forties. He's younger than Dad."

The agent breathed and pressed on. "Do you know where 'Uncle' Arthur lives?"

"With Uncle Eames, I'd imagine."

"Uncle Eames?"

"Yep. Fun guy."

"Is Eames his first name or his last name?"

Phil almost admired Agent Moustache—he barely even paused in his questions, rolling with every subtle twist she threw at him, refusing to be befuddled or confused.

"Dunno. He's always been 'Eames.'"

"Do you have any other… relatives?"

"None in the States. We've got an uncle in India and one in Japan, and our aunt lives in France."

Agent Jefferson looked confused, finally. He stopped gritting his teeth and his pencil stopped moving—something in his brain was turning, Phil could see it.

"I think Dad was in the mafia or something." Phillipa said, leaning in conspiratorially. "You know, drug running, prostitution, gambling, that kind of shit, and all of our 'uncles' are really his partners. It'd explain James, right? And why we're both basically set for life, and how Dad's been able to afford a fancy two-million-a-year hospital for fourteen years."

The agent stood up. "Now look here, Miss Cobb," he said angrily. "I'm not an idiot—"

"Could've fooled me," Phillipa stood up too, glaring at the cop. She was done with their game. "Can I leave now?"

"No."

"Am I being charged with anything?"

Agent Matt Jefferson clenched down on his teeth again. He was going to break them if he kept it up.

"No."

"Then goodbye." And she swung her bag over her shoulder and stalked out of the station, leaving Special Agent Matt Jefferson gaping after her like a fish.

The air outside was brisk and cool—it was fall, the leaves brilliant and gold and orange, like fire, the sky marbled gray. San Francisco was beautiful in the fall, with the mists rolling from the bay and the sweet-salty sea air that flooded the lungs.

Phillipa liked it here much better than she liked Los Angeles—there were too many people in L.A., too many voices, too much anger and greed and human ugliness. In San Fran there was less of this. There was still the anger and the greed and the ugliness, but people here accepted more, tolerated more. They were quieter and calmer and they didn't ask too many questions (unless they happened to be named Matt Jefferson) about a lonely young college student with a criminal brother and no parents.

The bike ride back to her apartment was peaceful, and she saw, every time she turned a corner, an unmarked old car trailing after her.

Subtle, Agent, she thought to herself, turning into the lot. Her apartment building was nice—too nice for a mostly-orphaned college student, actually—but her parents had money (supporting her mafia theory) and what the hell, they were dead or as good as, so they certainly didn't need it anymore.

As she walked up the steps, she saw the car park along the curb. She forced down a groan, rolling her eyes.

Very _subtle. I guess I'm not going anywhere without company… Goddamn cops. You see what I do for you, James? I should just turn your ass in. Maybe you'll listen to me _then.

Agent Jefferson and his FBI goons apparently thought that James would contact his sister, or vice versa, and that Phil was somehow involved—hiding her brother, maybe, or masterminding the whole thing. (She was an artist—forging the art he stole would be easy, with practice.)

Phil sighed. Cops make things so much harder. She would never turn James in, even if she fantasized about it—the detective should know that. James was really her only family left, and she loved him even if he was a fucking art thief. She had even said it, once. Agent Moustache probably had it on file somewhere.

And she didn't know where he was, even if the police thought she did. James didn't tell her much of anything anymore—he wasn't really even in her life.

She got postcards from him, and cash and little trinkets, but she hadn't actually seen him in something like a year.

She crushed the bitterness swelling in her chest—James was on the run, after all, and could hardly drop in and have a cup of coffee with his big sister, who would probably at least try to kill him on sight anyway.

Phil climbed the stairs, her mind occupied with swirling thoughts and feelings, most of them along the lines of _holy shit James if I ever get my hands on you I am going to kill you with my bare fucking hands you little dick, they will never find your body. _

Her apartment was all the way up, on the top floor, light and airy and more like a loft than anything. It was clean and bright and orderly, just like Phillipa liked it, and it suited her perfectly.

It looked nothing at all like her childhood home. The floors were all richly carpeted and the walls were cream and beige, and the furniture was white and the countertops were white marble.

There was no trace of that Place in her life now, no yard or wide high windows, no wooden floors, no knives left lying on the counters. There was no waiting, no pain or screaming or mad Mom, shrieking about dreams. There wasn't a photograph of a laughing young woman and a grinning young man on the wall, dancing at their wedding, or pictures of tiny children, all round cheeks and big eyes.

There wasn't a woman shouting in French or Edith Piaf playing somewhere (Phillipa never found out where—her parents hid the radio from each other, blasting music until one of them found it with a shout and turned it off, triumphant). There was silence.

Phillipa liked it, and when she woke up crying at night, she tangled her hands in rough sheets and listened and cried some more, because it was quiet and she couldn't even pretend she was home anymore, waiting for her father to come back.

She was tired. It had been a long day—waking up to a frantic phone call, seeing James' face on the news (she was still going to murder him), spending hours at the station, answering questions she had, sadly, answered before.

Except the question about Arthur. She'd been to the station eight separate times now (goddamn James and his goddamn thieving tendencies) and never once had the cops asked a question about Arthur or Phillipa's "extended family."

They usually asked about her mother—how did she die did your father do it how did James handle it—and her father—what happened to him was he abusive did he kill your mother do you miss him does James—and, occasionally, her grandparents.

But Arthur was an unknown connection to the Cobb family. He was one of her dad's old acquaintances, a partner in whatever the hell he was up to. He dropped in every now and then, immaculate in his suits, and kept an eye on things, but he'd never been a terribly huge presence in Phil's life.

She had always liked him, though. He was quiet, restrained, unlike his constant companion. He offered his steady silence, brought the order that she valued so much into the raucous, noisy chaos that was everywhere. He found her the apartment, pointed out her college (San Francisco Art Institute), and got her moved in.

Arthur was a Good Thing.

His "companion"—lover, really, because honestly Phil was sure that by now they had to be screwing each other, the sexual tension had been building for years—was a different story.

Eames was not a Bad Thing, not by any means. He was sweet and clever, when he wanted to be, and another old friend of the family. But he was chaos. He was loud and boisterous and immoral, loose and wild and fierce.

James adored him.

Eames visited too, always with Arthur, and smiled his big smile and called Phil "darling" and played the part of the whacky uncle, but Phillipa was still not convinced that he was a Good Thing.

If James looked up to him, he couldn't be, because James was in seriously deep shit with the cops, his face (he looked like their dad) splashed across every TV station in the state. He was a fucking art thief, for Christ's sake, and it most definitely was a Bad Thing.

It was a very very very Bad Thing.

The conventional childhood—mother, father, children—had long since been shattered, and Phillipa found herself, at eight, being raised by, collectively, seven people. Her grandparents had been the primary caregivers, but Grand-mère and Grandpa were at each other's throats so often that most of the time, only one of them had been in the house.

They had tried, though, until Grandpa was diagnosed with Alzheimer's when Phil was eighteen.

Arthur and Eames had been the "uncles" that visited the most. From what she understood, Arthur had been her father's "point man;" his right hand, his best friend. (Further support for the mafia theory—what sort of legit business man, or whatever the hell her dad had done, had a _point man? _Answer: the non-legit kind). Eames had known Dom—they had all done something together, something momentous—and he was loyal to Arthur, so he came along and provided James with a role model.

The other two "uncles," Saito and Yusuf, dropped in on Christmas and Thanksgiving. Saito was powerful, well-known, and he brought Phillipa and James fancy, thoughtful gifts. Phil thought that he had shared something deep with her father—he always came to visit him at the Arbors, even though he didn't have to.

Yusuf was weird. He was scruffy and he smelled like chemicals, and he always had something entertaining up his sleeves.

He set the house on fire, once, Phil remembered. Grand-mère refused to let him in after that.

In the whole group of "relatives," Phillipa had one "aunt," Ariadne. She was a professor in France—Grandpa's old job—and she was _tiny_, and Phil loved her. She was what a mother should be, Phil thought, and she went to her for advice or just to talk, to vent and lean on a sympathetic woman.

She still needed to let her know about James' latest escapade, actually. The tiny older woman liked to be informed.

From the little scraps she'd been told, Phil gathered that Ariadne had been the youngest and newest member of her father's… business group, and she'd been something like her dad's student.

She glared at her father, and wondered how many other 'students' he'd taught, and if he made them as sad as Ariadne seemed to be, as Arthur and Eames and Saito and Yusuf often seemed to be.

Phillipa almost groaned in frustration, looking bleakly out the window. It was three in the afternoon, she had a headache, her brother was probably on the FBI's Most Wanted List, and her "uncles" were popping up, something that had never happened before.

Ten hours ago, Phil had woken up with the intention of spending the day in the library, picking a thesis, and going out to buy paint supplies. She had wanted to go to Starbuck's, grab a cappuccino, and maybe watch the ducks in the Bay for a little while or do a little painting in her studio.

And James, as always, managed to single-handedly ruin it in eight-and-a-half minutes, according to the TV reporter.

_Stop it_, Phil told herself irritably, turning away from the window and pacing around her apartment. _Just because Agent Moustache brought up the past doesn't mean you need to sulk._

The past was gone—there was no house in Los Angeles anymore, with French words and laughter and knives on the table.

There was only this, this beige-and-cream existence, and Phillipa was okay with it.

She needed to be okay with it.

The unmarked car still sat on the curb, the windows dark, tinted. She wondered if she could get away from them long enough to go visit her father.

As soon as the thought occurred to her, she almost laughed at herself.

She hated to go see her father.

He was the Past. In fact he was literally her manifestation of the Past, because no matter Phil went, she couldn't seem to get away from him.

In elementary school, her classmates wouldn't play with her because their parents told them that her dad was a killer. Even though he was gone, kids wouldn't come to her house or invite her to parties. Phillipa was alone because the world had once believed that Dominick Cobb killed his wife, even if he was cleared two years later.

Since the man was in a coma, he couldn't really share his side of the story, so everyone went on believing that he was a wife-killer who got off because he was sick, or rich, or both.

Which meant that, wherever she went, rumors of her father preceded her. So she didn't really have any friends. There were people who avoided her because they'd watched too much _Criminal Minds_ as kids and thought that kids whose parents were killers were killers too, and then there were people who offered simpering apologizes and false smiles and tried to make themselves feel better by pitying the poor orphan girl.

Phillipa mostly hated them all.

She was okay with that.

There were a lot of things that Phillipa was okay with.

What she was not okay with was the fact that there was a cop car parked outside her apartment, and it looked highly unlikely that they were going to let her go anywhere anytime soon.

She had things to do. She was in college for Christ's sake—she had a fucking thesis to write and finals to study for. She knew that most cops didn't care that she attended college (they only cared about catching James and locking him up), but still that was no excuse for ruining what could have been a good day's work.

And there wasn't much to do in Phillipa Cobb's apartment. She had a TV and a laptop and a few books, some food (mostly mac-and-cheese and soup) and that was about it.

She didn't spend much time in her apartment.

And the studio was at school, and, irrational as it was, Phil didn't want to go there, bring the police to the only place were she really let go, where she let it all out, splashed it onto a canvas in brilliant colors.

The thought of the police there was like sacrilege.

But…

An idea returned in her head, persistent. There was one place she could go; the ridiculously expensive private clinic where her father's shell slept.

The cops would follow—with luck, Detective Jefferson would think that Phillipa was going to meet James, since the cops wouldn't be allowed in (it was a very very very expensive private clinic—security was awesome) and he'd waste his time investigating that and the mob idea that Phil fed him.

And then they'd leave her alone, like she liked it, and it would be okay again, and that was worth taking the trip that she hated, if only she could have peace and order.

Until James screwed it up. Again.

No, Phil told herself, shoving the annoying thought from her mind. I am not spending the rest of my day off at the clinic, staring at Dad's shell.

She flopped down on her bed, glaring at the ceiling. It was three in the afternoon and she had no where to go, nothing to do but stare at the stucco.

"Jesus, I need a life," she muttered, and hopped up again, stalking into the kitchen. Tea would fix this—tea would cure everything, the only good advice Uncle Eames had ever given—and she had plenty, and she could go for some chamomile, right about now.

She was halfway through making a cup when the door buzzer went off, loud and obnoxious.

_Just fucking great. _

It buzzed again, loud, annoying, and with a groan she thunked her teacup down on the counter and stalked to the intercom.

"Hello?" She snapped, pressing the button.

There was the crackle of static and a man cleared his voice. "Uh, package for a Ms. Cobb?" He said. He sounded young, maybe her age.

"Package? I wasn't expecting anything."

"To Ms. Phillipa Cobb," the delivery guy read. "From Jimmy Darling?"

"Oh! I'll be right down!" Phillipa rocketed out the door, all her anger left stewing with her teacup. She half-flew down the stairs, bounding into the lobby where a delivery guy about her age, young and scruffy, stood with an awkward package in his arms.

"You're Ms. Cobb?" The guy said.

She nodded eagerly, reaching for the package.

"Okay," he groped for a clipboard and pen. "Sign here, please."

"Uh, sure." She did, in her messy, looping scrawl, and took the awkward box, tucking it under her arm.

The delivery guy smiled. "Have a nice day," he said, and she smiled distractedly as he left.

_A package from James_!

Jimmy was James' nickname and Darling was what Eames called everyone; Jimmy Darling, alias for one Jim Cobb.

He sent me something, she thought, happier. She missed him, really, and it was nice to get packages; it showed her that her brother still cared. She climbed the stairs again and rounded the corner to her apartment just as one of her neighbors was disappearing from view.

Her door was open, but she'd left it that way, and she dropped the box on the table and went back to her tea.

It tasted perfect, like chamomile and sleep, and she closed her eyes.

_Mmm,_ she thought, and she staggered, a little bit. _Little strong?_

Her eyes flew open and she swayed, the world twisting away. What…?

She fell forward, hitting the floor because she couldn't seem to reach out and stop herself.

_What's going on? What's happening_? She thought, blurrily, and far away footsteps were closing in, stopping in front of her.

_Oh_, she thought. _I'm being kidnapped. There was a drug in my tea? _

She didn't have time to think about the specifics. Phillipa closed her eyes to stop the spinning, and she fell.

* * *

Two

_Footfalls echo in the memory  
Down the passage which we did not take  
Towards the door we never opened  
Into the rose-garden._

She opens her eyes and she's dreaming. She knows this because she's standing in the shadow of a clock tower, in a field of rolling white grass, and just minutes ago—at least she's pretty sure it was only minutes, but one can never tell in dreams—she was sitting in a hospital, watching her father sleep.

The air is sweet and cool—the beginning of spring. Tiny little wildflowers bloom at her feet, pink and purple and yellow and white. The sky is wide and impossibly blue—the blue of memories, of forgotten things.

It hurts to look at it.

The clock strikes three in the afternoon, deep peals of a bell echoing across the white field. Phillipa breathes, the grass tickling her bare feet. Her summer dress is white, rippling in the gentle breeze.

_At least I'm not dreaming of home,_ she thinks, running her hands down the smooth sandstone of the clock tower. _At least I'm not dreaming of the past. _

"I wouldn't say that, Phil."

She spins, startled, and presses up against the wall in shock, and when she recognizes him, she almost snarls. "Why are you here?"

Her father smiles at her, gently. "This isn't my dream," he says. "I have no idea why I'm here." His eyes are the blue of the sky and Phillipa can't look at him.

Dom Cobb is every inch the man she remembers—tall, broad-shouldered, sandy-haired, eyes sharp and intelligent and just a little dreamy, as if he wasn't all there all the time. (And he's not—he's lying on a hospital bed, lost, mostly dead.)

She stopped dreaming of her father a long time ago, when she realized that he was never coming back. It hurt too much to think about him.

"Dad," she says, and he offers her a lopsided grin and with a stab she remembers being three and laughing as he spun her, around and around and around in the sunshine. "Leave."

He keeps smiling. "I can't do that, Phil," he says, shrugging his shoulders.

"Leave," she repeats, and her dress is fluttering and her hair is pulled back by the wind, the wildflowers dancing at her feet.

He shakes his head and his eyes are the color of dreaming. "Dreams don't work that way, Phillipa."

Her hands ball into fists. "It's my dream," she insists, angrily. "I can make it whatever I want. Now get. Out."

"Prove it."

"What?"

His challenge is enough to stop her anger, briefly.

"Prove to me that you can change the dream. Make me leave."

"I—"

"Ah," he says, and he's got smug disappointment in his eyes. "You can't." He steps closer, and Phil can't get any farther back.

He smells like the ocean, clean and sharp and salty.

"Don't worry," he says, patiently. "You'll learn."

"Go away." She feels like a broken record but she's got nothing else to say to this man, to this father who is what she remembers, not what she sees lying broken on a hospital bed.

Dom Cobb backs up, tilts his head up to look at the clock tower. "Huh," he says. "That's an odd clock."

And he nods, almost to himself. "You are my daughter," he says, slowly. "I'll see you soon, Phil."

And then he's gone and she's left alone in the white field and the clock looms above her, and she smells the smell of the ocean on the wind.

She shakes with anger. "I'm not your daughter," she tells the wind. "You lost the right to call me that when you left."

He doesn't respond, and the wind blows and the bell tolls, and she stands in a field of wildflowers in a summer dress, waiting for the world to change.

It doesn't.

* * *

Three

_But to what purpose  
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves  
I do not know._

"Phillipa," someone said, and she snapped back to earth, eyes flickering open in alarm.

Her first thought was that it was dark. The weak sunlight was gone, replaced by darker, rolling clouds. A storm was brewing. The room was full of shadows that slanted off desks and support beams, and she realized she was lying in a lawn chair and gasped.

A thousand things came rushing at her at once—she'd been at home, she'd just received a package, taken a drink of tea, and then there was rushing dark and clock towers and dreams that sang in her blood, and holy shit she'd been kidnapped, her tea had been drugged, she didn't know where she was—

Panic made her heart spike and her breath catch, and when someone laid a hand on her shoulder, she damn near leaped out of her skin and keeled over right there.

"Phillipa, relax."

She knew that voice.

"Uncle Arthur," she said, and sat up.

Arthur stood beside the chair, stiff and straight. He blinked down at his "niece" and offered her a slight (if strained) smile when she stared up at him, deeply, deeply confused.

"It's okay, Pippa," he said, using his private name for her. "You're safe, you're with us. There's no reason to be afraid."

"I was kidnapped," she squinted up at him, confused, her heart pulsing unsteadily under her skin. "My tea was drugged.

Arthur shrugged apologetically. "It was the only way to get you out without Jefferson's dogs knowing."

"You_ drugged_ my _tea_? " She hissed, outrage quickly replacing fear. "_You drugged my fucking tea?" _

"It was necessary," Arthur tried, spreading his hands as if to say you really left us with no choice there, Pip.

"Arthur Whatever-the-fuck-your-last-name-is, _I am going to end you." _

"Watch it with this one, darling," someone new said, and another familiar shape padded from the shadows. "I think she means it." Whatever-the-fuck-his-first-name-is Eames smiled fondly at the fuming Phillipa, coming to lean on Arthur's shoulder.

"Please don't kill him, Phil," Eames said cheerfully. "I'm rather attached to him, and it's a pain to go looking for sex at my age."

Arthur glared. "Shut up, Eames."

"He drugged my_ tea_," Phillipa growled, still pissed, because it was her tea, goddamit.

Eames stared. "You heartless bastard," he said. Arthur glared some more.

"It was _your _idea, Mr. Eames," the taller man shot back darkly.

The Brit paled. "Well don't tell _her_ that," he cried, throwing his hand out in Phil's general direction. "She'll murder me! And get away with it, seeing as Saito's wrapped around her pretty little finger, she can probably get him to buy a judge, jury and a fucking _airline_—"

"This was your idea?" Phil struggled to her feet, ignoring the way the room—warehouse, she thought, because of the size—spun madly. "You little British traitor, that's sacrilege! Tea is sacred! You said so yourself!"

"Which is why," Arthur cut in smoothly, most likely to save his booty call from eminent castration or death. "It must be important, if Eames drugged your tea to get you away."

Phillipa glared viciously at both of them, waiting for the world to stop moving. "What's so important?"

"Calm down and we'll tell you, pet," Eames said soothingly.

Arthur nodded in affirmation, and Phil rolled her eyes and tried to slow her breathing. She looked at her "uncles" for the first time in over a year, and was startled to see how old they looked.

Arthur was forty-something, but he looked almost like he was fifty- streaks of gray shot through his slicked-back hair and lines deepened the corners of his mouth (which was odd, considering he usually had no expression whatsoever on his face). He had tired eyes, but he stood straight and proud, his suit immaculate and pressed, if a little outdated.

His dark eyes were kind, if a little anxious, and covered by neat wire-frame glasses.

Eames had aged better than Arthur. His hair was still brown, his face lined but not as deeply as Arthur's or as her father's. He still had the bounce in his step, the cocky arrogance that characterized him settled around his shoulders.

They were in a warehouse, that much was obvious, now that it was swimming steadily into focus, her eyes adjusting to the deep almost-gray light. There were lawn chairs strewn sporadically inbetween desks and papers scattered all over the place. Architecture models covered on table and a smoking series of test tubes another. The warehouse wasn't silent—no, there was sound, the hum of electricity, the creak of old buildings, but the sound was muted, somehow, subdued. It wasn't unlike having one's ears popped.

It was too quiet and too strange, and a prickle of unease ran down Phillipa's spine.

"What's going on?" She demanded, finally. "What's so important that you had to kidnap me to talk?"

The two man exchanged deep glances (they were _so_ screwing each other) and Arthur shifted forward, the light glinting off his glasses.

"I assume you know what your brother did this morning?"

Phil's expression darkened. "Yes," she hissed. "He's the reason I've got the fucking cops following me, the little bastard."

Arthur's lip quirked. "Yeah," he said. "Things are starting to get out of hand."

"Things? What things? James things?"

"James things," Arthur agreed.

"That lad's after my own heart," Eames said affectionately. Phillipa kicked him in the shin.

Arthur dipped his head, almost indulgently. That was the way he communicated—with his body, the way he stood or held himself. It was interesting, because he didn't use his face and it made Phillipa wonder why.

Her curiosity was almost overwhelming—she loved mysteries, and with someone as naturally mysterious as Arthur, something good was going on.

Maybe he was going to tell her secrets—old secrets, information about her dad, her mom, what they had all done together.

She liked secrets, and as much as she disliked the past, she wanted to know why her family was the way it was—screwed-up and half-dead and mostly composed of people she was pretty sure were criminals.

She was a curious person. According to Grand-mère, her parents had been the same way; insatiable in there need to know more, to learn more. And from the way her old grandmother talked, this need, this desire, was one of the reasons that Phillipa's mother died.

Phil didn't know what that meant. Did her mother get too curious about the wrong thing, piss off the wrong people? Or did she get too curious about her husband and what he did, pry too deeply, and force Dominick to kill her?

Maybe Arthur knew.

_You are going to give me answers_, she thought, watching his face for the slightest sign. _You are going to tell me what's going on. _

"Things are going too far," Arthur said, slowly. "So we decided to do something about it."

"What's going too far?"

Arthur's face was black. "Agent," he said disdainfully, with the air of a king looking down at a particularly filthy peasant, "Matthew Jefferson."

Phillipa raised her eyebrows, surprised. "You know him?"

The older man's face was as dark as it could get. "Yes," he said. "Agent Jefferson is a stubborn son of a bitch, he's got a grudge, and he's very, very well connected."

"Why does he have a grudge against me?"

"Not you," Arthur corrected. "James. Or, more specifically, your father."

Phil scowled. It always came back to Dad. "Dad's as good as dead," she snapped coldly. "Why the hell does Jefferson still care?"

"Maybe someone else should explain that, pet," Eames said. He turned to face the depths of the warehouse. "Jimmy!" He called.

"What?" A familiar voice shouted back, and from a lawn chair (while she was on the topic, what the hell were lawn chairs doing in an abandoned warehouse? It didn't make sense.) a tousled head of blonde-ish hair popped up and a lanky form came ambling out of the shadows.

James Cobb brushed dirt off his suit and smiled hugely. "Phil!"

* * *

Four

_Other echoes  
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?  
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,  
Round the corner. Through the first gate,  
Into our first world, shall we follow  
The deception of the thrush? _

For several seconds, Phillipa didn't know whether to strangle her brother or hug him; she just gaped openly, stunned to see him out and about and there, so close after a year of separation. So she settled for both.

She half-tackled him, crushing him to her fiercely, delighted that he was safe and not in prison and pissed that he made her worry in the first place.

"You fucking _dick_," she hissed, still unsure whether or not she was trying to hug or kill him. "Give me one good reason why I shouldn't kill you right now."

James made a possibly apologetic sound and tugged gently at her arms, his face turning a mild shade of red.

"Let him go, Phillipa," Arthur said gently, pulling her arms off of her baby brother.

James took a huge gulp of air and grinned ruefully, rubbing his ribs. "Probably deserved that," he said.

Eames laughed.

"You did," Phillipa informed him frostily. "You stole. Again."

James' face hardens imperceptibly. "Yeah," he said, slowly. "Yeah, I did."

"Children," Eames broke in, firmly. "We have more important things to discuss tonight."

"More important things?" Phil snapped, incredulous and angry. "He's on the fucking FBI's fucking _Most Wanted List_. Every cop in the state is looking for him. He's facing years of prison time! What's more important than that, huh?"

"Phil—"

"Do _not_ start with me, James. I have fucking cops following me everywhere, probably going through my home, through the studio, through my life. _My _life, James! Not yours!"

The young man had the sense to look ashamed, but Phillipa knew it wasn't real, wasn't sincere. James would do it again in a heartbeat.

"I should turn you in," she seethed. "Maybe then you'd think before do something like robbing a fucking museum you asshole. Do you have any idea what you've done? Did you even think, James, about who'd you hurt?"

James shifted uncomfortably, but his face was defiant. "I knew what I was doing," he said.

"You knew? Why the hell'd you do it then? To piss me off? Because you can't fucking control yourself?"

"You don't know, Phil, you don't understand—"

"The fuck is there to understand? You robbed a goddamn museum. You took $500,000 dollars worth of art, James. You're lucky no one was hurt."

"I wouldn't hurt anyone."

"You could have. You walk into a museum with guns, Jim. I mean, what the hell do you think will happen? You sneak in and creep around and steal things and you have a gun in the waistband of your pants. It's less violent, sure, but what happens when someone tries to fight back? When someone jumps at you and you shoot him or get caught?"

James was quiet, though she thought she heard him mutter "actually I freaking crawl, thanks."

"Exactly," Phillipa said coldly. "Exactly, James."

Arthur laid a hand on her, trying to pull her away. "Phillipa, you're angry."

"No shit!"

"You need to calm down, darling," Eames joined in. "This is not the time."

"It's the first time I've seen him in a year. When am I going to see him again, huh? At his trial? In fucking _prison_?"

"Phil, I had a reason, this time." James wouldn't look her in the eye, instead choosing to stare (with his father's eyes, disturbingly blue, the color of a dream) at the wall.

"Yeah? What reason could possibly be good enough to steal from a museum? To take that much in art?"

"Agent," he spat, angrily. "Matthew Jefferson."

That shut Phil up, for a minute. "Agent Jefferson again?"

James met her eyes. "You know him, right?"

"He questioned me today. He's leading the investigation on you."

James curled his lip angrily. "Bastard."

"What did he do to you?"

"He's been after me since last August," James muttered. "Since I stole that Picasso, remember?"

Phillipa remembered.

"So?" She demanded, still angry, not convinced that she shouldn't squeeze the life out of him.

Her brother studied her, his bangs falling messily into his face. She tried not think about how much he looked like a kicked puppy, because she was not going to forgive him this time.

"He's ruthless," said James. "I mean _ruthless_. He's talked to everyone who knew me; teachers, old neighbors, friends, tried to get every scrap of information that he can get. He's bullied and threatened and coerced everyone into talking about what a bad kid I was, how horrible I was to everyone."

Phillipa listened and watched his face, searching for a lie.

James swallowed, obviously rankled and still angry by whatever Special Agent Moustache had done to incite his fury.

"He went to Grandpa," he said, lowly.

Phil's hands curled into fists, involuntarily. "He what?"

"He went to Grandpa, and bullied him into talking about me, about us."

"Grandpa has Alzheimer's," Phillipa almost snarled. "He doesn't remember—"

"He remembers enough." James' voice was ice. "He remembers us as kids, and he remembers Dad mostly just fine."

"Wait, what? Dad?"

"Agent Jefferson," Arthur cut in smoothly, "was the detective who investigated your mother's death."

"What?"

All three men watched Phillipa solemnly, and agitation crackled under her skin, her previous excitement and anticipation gone.

"He investigated your father for two years," Arthur continued. "And when he came back in li—in the coma, he pushed for your father to be disconnected from life support and given the death penalty."

"_What?"_

"He's a bastard," James said darkly. "Dad didn't kill Mom, the charges were dropped, but this fuckwad, he didn't quit. He was furious that Dad was put in the hospital, was being taken care of. He never let it go."

"And then Jimmy here started displaying less than legal tendencies," Eames cut in fondly, ruffling James' blonde hair. Phillipa kicked him in the ankle this time.

"Don't encourage him," she said sharply.

"He joined the FBI," Arthur continued, reading from what appeared to be a dossier. Of course he had a dossier. With every passing minute, Phillipa was becoming more and more convinced that she was in the presence of Mafiosos. "And moved up quickly through the Bureau—he closes cases—and was assigned to James last year."

"I can't believe he went to Grandpa."

That was just wrong, bullying a man half-out of his mind with Alzheimer's for information on a case that was effectively closed fourteen years ago.

"This is why we went to get you," Arthur said. "It's getting out of hand."

"Detective Jefferson?"

"Not just him," Eames said. "Everything. Everything that's been buried for fourteen years, it's coming back to the surface."

"Fourteen years?" Phillipa narrowed her eyes, anger curling in her stomach. It all came back to Dominick Cobb. "Just what the hell were you all involved in?"

The two older men exchanged glances.

"Don't lie to me," she instructed. "I know you and Dad and everyone else in the "family" were up to your necks in illegal shit. What was it? Drugs? Prostitution? You were the goddamn mafia, weren't you?"

"Mafia?" James asked.

"It makes sense," she said grimly. "Look at the facts; they're obviously criminals, Dad was doing illegal shit, the cops started to notice…"

"We weren't the fucking mafia," Eames said, affronted. "We had more_ class_ than that."

Arthur shook his head, a tiny little movement that meant shut up, we're done with this.

"I want answers," Phil said, sounding stronger and more in control than she felt. "Now, please."

Eames laughed, walking over to a table where a silver briefcase lay, unassuming. "She's got a good bit of her mother, doesn't she?"

"Eames," Arthur said warningly.

"I'm going to tell her," the older man said calmly. "It's time she knew, darling."

"Knew what?"

"We weren't mafia," Eames said gently. "We were in the extraction business."

"Extraction?" Phil was confused now—they were trying to mess with her or something, to confuse her. It wasn't going to work.

"Ever heard of dreamshare?"

She nodded, this time. Sharing dreams, using a special drug and machine to create and experience a world all your own, had been a huge thing when she was a kid—it was always in the news— but when she was twelve or so, the government ruled it illegal—something to do with stealing secrets, with extracting—_oh,_ she thought, and she got it.

"Extraction is stealing secrets," she said. "Right?"

"More or less," Arthur said. "It's a little more complex than that, but yes, that's the general idea.

"You were involved in _dreamshare_?" She remembered the news broadcasts quite clearly—police raids, trails, hordes of screaming, angry people, shouting "_thieves! Thieves!"_

"It wasn't such a bad thing, back then," Eames said.

"When we started, we had good intentions," Arthur said earnestly. "We tried to make the world better, tried to learn. Your parents were researchers; their work helped hundreds, maybe thousands, or mental patients, and we trained soldiers to be better."

"Why'd the government ban it, then?"

"They saw what it could be. They cut the funding, left dreamshare in some dark closet somewhere," Eames interjected. "So people like us, like your parents, were left with these skills and no legitimate was to use 'em. So we turned to less-than-legal ways. Extraction, inception, the like."

"My parents were criminals?"

"The best," Arthur had a note of painful nostalgia in his voice. "We didn't really hurt anyone, per say—no murder, no prostitution, but yeah, it wasn't legal."

"And then a few years ago the government made all types of dreamshare an imprisonable offence," spat Eames. "So our trade all but died. But dreaming was a huge part of your parents' lives, and, well…" He trailed off, looking uncertainly to Arthur, who looked at James, who shrugged.

"When Mom died, Jefferson was assigned to her case," the youngest Cobb said. "He got obsessed—dunno how—and he's been after Dad and me ever since."

"Why you?"

"I inherited Dad's illegality, apparently, and that offends him," James was dry, older than his seventeen years.

"How did Mom die?" The question slipped out before Phil could stop it, could crush it and never think about it again.

Arthur's eyes were sad and gentle. "Dream with us," he said. "And I'll explain."

Eames smiled, gestured to the silver briefcase sitting on the desk.

Phillipa stared at the silver briefcase. It looked familiar… she had seen it before…

James was watching her with his dream-blue eyes, his face framed by his hair. He looked so serious, far too old. He should still be in high school, agonizing over prom and grades and sports, not running loose with the FBI baying at his heels.

"You want to know what we got up to, back then, darling?" Eames approached her, opening the briefcase, and she strained to see. "All the rotten things we did?"

"Eames," Arthur warned. "Don't scare her."

"Relax, darling, you worry too much. James was fine. She's got dreaming in her blood, same as him. A little somnacin won't hurt her. Five minutes out to do it, don't you think?"

Arthur sighed. "Five," he agreed.

"I'm coming under too," James declared, flopping down on the nearest lawn chair. "It's easier than explaining."

"Explaining what?" She was starting to get nervous now, the tense expressions of everyone in the room setting her on edge.

"Just relax, darling," Eames said soothingly, and he pulled a needle from the briefcase in a long fluid movement.

Arthur grabbed her wrist and she twisted, instinctively, but James was there and he was stronger, damn him, and he pushed her gently into a chair.

"Relax," he said, and his eyes were sparkling. "It's amazing, Phil. It's like nothing you've ever seen."

She stared into his eyes—her brother, her thieving, loving little brother.

"You ready?" Eames said, and he was there with his whirring briefcase. "Come on, love, it won't hurt. Don't you want to know how your parents felt?"

_Goddamn curiosity_, she thought, because she did, she really, really did. She closed her eyes briefly and, in one jerky, rough movement, dragged up her sleeve to reveal her pale wrists. Eames smiled fondly.

"Good girl," he said. "This will be like nothing you've ever felt." And he pushed the needle into her skin and the silver machine-thing started to him softly.

"Pleasant dreams," he said, and then the world went dark.

_Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,  
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.  
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind  
Cannot bear very much reality._


	2. part ii

**Inception big_bang fic. Part II of V. **

**Dedicated to paintedsongs, iheartfluffy, Molly, Sam, Crystal, and Jim. **

**Disclaimer: Inception and _Burnt Norton _do not belong to me. **

* * *

Part Two

_Garlic and sapphires in the mud  
Clot the bedded axle-tree.  
The trilling wire in the blood  
Sings below inveterate scars  
Appeasing long forgotten wars._

* * *

One

_At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;  
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,  
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,  
Where past and future are gathered._

She's standing in the shadow of the clock tower.

Everything is fuzzy, blurry—the field the flowers the clock itself—and she's close to panic, her heart kicking violently against her ribs.

This is a dream.

She realizes it right off, because she mostly remembers the warehouse and her brother, and Arthur and Eames and needles.

"Lovely place you've got here," and Eames comes ambling through the white field, looking around interestedly. "Bit too artsy for my taste, though."

"Eames," Arthur's there too, still decked out in his suit, adjusting the already perfect lapel. "Leave her alone. She's confused."

"I know I was." James is suddenly beside Phil and she jumps, the world spinning into focus. James grins at her, the full, wild grin he gets when he's happy. "Hey, Phil."

"This is a dream," she tells him.

"I know."

"What…?"

"You wanted to know what we did, fourteen years ago, that started this mess," Arthur said, his voice clipped, echoing in the dream space. "This is it. This is what we did."

"_This_ is dreamshare?" She said, throwing her arms wide.

"Oh, no," Eames laughs. "This is only the beginning."

She can see _everything_—the dream is vivid and real against her skin. She can taste the flowers in the air and feel the waving grass brush against her bare legs. She's wearing a white dress. The clock strikes three and the notes reverberate in her bones.

"This is _real,_" she breathes, because it has to be, you can't dream like this, it just doesn't happen.

"It isn't," Arthur says, warning lacing his voice. "This is a dream, Pippa. Think about it. Could a place like this really be real?"

She looks around—the blinding sun, the bluer than blue sky, the field that rolls of its own power, almost. And the clock tower that her father called odd, because it only has nine hours—one two three five six seven nine ten and eleven. It was missing twelve, four, and eight, and it ticked slowly, at a tempo that couldn't be right.

"We're real, Phil." James is earnest, happier than she's seen him in years, since he started stealing, actually. "But all of this isn't. This is just a dream. An awesome dream, but still."

"Here," Arthur says, and there's a rippling sound, like a stone being thrown in water, and then the dream _shifts_ in a way that hurts to look at.

The white field rolls, sinks, melts to brown cobblestone. The wildflowers go, surging upwards, becoming buildings and gas street lights. People spring from the air, decked to the nines in suits and dresses that belong in the 1880s (much like Arthur, her mind supplies).

The whole process takes a second or an hour, and soon she's standing in what could be Victorian London, the clock tower behind her striking three.

Arthur looks rather pleased with himself. "This isn't reality, Phillipa," he says.

"What did you just do?" She asks, and her eyes are wide and wonder whispers in her veins.

"I changed the dream—created a new one for us to inhabit. It's called Architecture. Your grandfather Miles invented it."

"Grandpa?"

"Yeah. He was one of the original creators of dreamshare, and one of the world's leading experts until he retired."

"_Grandpa?_" It was hard o reconcile the image of the doddery old man of her childhood with a man who could create something like this—something that couldn't be real but had to be, because it _felt _so real.

"Your grandfather created it, and your dad was one of his best students."

"Your father did this, originally." Eames is staring at the clock tower, an unreadable expression on his lined face.

"He built things like this?"

"Your father was very good at building things like this," Eames says. "You saw what Arthur did, built the dream from the inside out?"

She nods, still confused and mostly convinced that she's gone crazy. Eames smiles. "Your father could do that, and he did it _well_. He started out as an Architect, a dream-builder. He built the worlds that the military used, that psychiatric patients used to get better."

"And dream-sharing only grew from there," James adds helpfully. "The government shut down the program, but the technology didn't go away. Businesses started to use it, to sabotage and steal ideas from rivals."

"Extraction," Phillipa says.

"People like Dad were out of work with the government closing the program, so they started to work for the businesses, training the CEOs and all their minions to resist and detect extraction. That's what Mom did—she was lead, she went into dreams and taught the client dreaming.

"She and your father, they were quite a pair," Eames takes up the story. Phillipa's head spins. "They met through your granddad—Cobb was a student of his and Mal was his daughter—and they took to each other, exploring dreams, pushing and pushing and pushing."

"They pushed too hard," Phil says, remembering Grand-mère and how she said her parents were too curious. They pushed and pushed and something just _broke_—

"They did," Arthur's face was sad. "They went so far they fell into _limbo_—empty, raw subconscious—and something _changed _in Mal.

"She thought that reality wasn't real." She vividly remembered her mother and the knife, dripping with tomato juice, screaming _they are not our children!_

"Exactly. She killed herself, intending to make Cobb jump too—"

"No!" Phil shouts, and suddenly the anger is swimming in her veins again. "No, stop it, this isn't _real_."

"It is," James says, wide-eyed and cajoling. "It's a lot to take in, Phil, but it's _true_."

"It can't be!" Hopeless anger, born from the stress and the shock and the too-much of it all, coursed through her.

The dream began to shift again, the people on the streets pausing in their steps, glaring venomously at the three men who were spilling lies as easily as one would breathe air.

This is not real. It's just a dream, but there are words that she doesn't want to hear falling from their mouths and it needs to _stop_—

"Phillipa—" Arthur begins.

"No," she says. "I don't want anything to do with this. I don't care if this is real or if this is a dream. I'm not going to be a part of this, this is insanity."

"Phil—"

"This killed my parents!" She cries, high and sharp and jagged. "This ruined my family! James, this is what broke us, what made you a theif and me the way I am, and I don't want any part of it!"

"Pippa," Arthur says, a little desperately. "You can't leave now, we still have time on the clock. Stay and hear us out, okay?"

"No!"

"Please, darling."

"Didn't you hear?" A new voice, smoother, darker, floats through the air, freezing Arthur and Eames in their shoes, and Dom Cobb breaks from the crowd and comes to stand beside his daughter, tall and broad and blue-eyed. "She wants you to leave."

Arthur and Eames stare at him, eyes wide, frozen, and Dom smiles.

"Look at you guys," he says. "You've gotten old."

"You look the same," Arthur gasps, shock evident in the slight widening of his eyes, in the way he leans back and away.

"Yeah," says the man, conversationally, and James is staring at him blatantly, his face so slack-jawed he can't be cognitively thinking anything.

He's staring at his father, who disappeared when James was too young to remember what he was like. It hurts Phil to see him.

"My daughter asked you to leave," Dom Cobb repeats, and he smiles.

Arthur and Eames look like they've seen a ghost (and they have) and they seem to have forgotten how to move.

Cobb sighs, heavily, and Phil watches him, unable to look away.

In the space of a second, he pulls out a gun and shoots them both, right between the eyes.

Arthur and Eames drop to the ground and they are gone, and James makes a choked sound, gasping.

Dom turns to his daughter and smiles.

"I told you that I'd see you again," he says, and then he too is gone.

The buildings are shaking now, bricks tumbling, shattering, scattering the people who dissolve like smoke.

The earth is rumbling and ripping and Phil is staring at James, their faces white, mirroring the same shock.

"That was Dad?" She hears James say, as the world crumbles and quivers.

_Yes_, she thinks, and then she falls.

Coming back to earth was hard and fast—she bolted upright and nearly fell off the lawn chair, scrabbling that the plastic, dragging the needle from her arm, her chest heaving in shock.

James made a similar sound and bolted upright, his arm dripping tiny beads of blood as he fixed his wild blue eyes on his sister.

"Holy shit," he choked.

"He shot me," Arthur said, touching his forehead, and Eames had a similar expression on his face, and Phillipa _knew_, she knew that it had been more than a dream, that it had felt _real_, had almost been real, and her dad shot his old friends and apparently her whole family had been up to their necks in _dreamsharing _and her mom was dead and her dad was gone and this was _so _not okay.

With a soundless cry, she turned on her heel and ran, sprinting out of the warehouse, into the dark, cool night, James' shouts ringing behind her, her father's eyes imprinted on her memory.

* * *

Two

_Except for the point, the still point,  
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.  
I can only say, __there__ we have been: but I cannot say where._

"That's very good, Phillipa!" Mrs. Lacey Gillian peered over her shoulder, staring at the painting intently. Phil's hands shook, and she gripped the paintbrush tighter to stop it.

"What is it?" The teacher continued, looking at the watercolor painting with admiration.

Phillipa glared at the painting, at the blue sky and the white field and the dots of wildflowers, at the girl and the man standing in the shadow of a clock tower.

"It's me," she said. "Meeting my father."

Mrs. Gillian tutted knowingly. "How very deep," she commented. "A young woman meeting her father but only in a dream."

"How do you know it's a dream?" Phil asked, surprised.

"The clock," the teacher pointed. "It doesn't make sense, so I assumed…"

Looking closer, Phil saw that she had painted the clock without twelve, four, and eight, just like her dream. She smiled bitterly.

"It's a dream," she said, reassuring her teacher. "I had it last night."

"I'm sure that your father would have loved it," Mrs. Gillian patted Phil on the shoulder and smiled. "It's beautiful." She moved on to the other students, leaving Phillipa alone with her work.

Her hands were shaking.

She'd staggered into her apartment at four in the morning, shivering, having taken a gypsy cab from the warehouse to her home.

Last night had been traumatic, to say the least.

People could share dreams. They could actually go into each other's thoughts and talk to one another and shape the landscape and move things around and steal and protect, and it was _terrifying. _Dreamshare had been called evil, terrible. To think that someone could slide into her deepest dreams was highly unsettling, and her father and mother, hell, her whole _family_, had been involved in it.

It was earth-shattering.

Even now, hours later, Phillipa still saw the Victorian buildings and heard the sound of the clock striking three and the bell doling out, and she watched her father step from the crowd and shoot his former friends and partners, as easy as could be.

It wasn't _possible_, how real it had been, how she had smelled the ocean when Dom Cobb stepped past her, felt the heat of the bullets as they left the gun_. _But it _was_, because she had been there_. _

Phil didn't know what to think.

On one hand, she was intrigued. The concept was fantastic and exciting, and she still didn't know why Special Agent Jefferson was targeting her brother or how the thing worked. She prickled with curiosity, but at the same time, common sense ordered her back.

This dream-sharing had effectively killed her parents. According to Eames it had driven her mother Mal insane, had twisted her perception of dream and reality so much that she threw herself from a building. And her father hadn't been much better, apparently. He'd almost followed his wife, and then he was gone, in a coma.

Arthur had shouted something after her, as she ran into the dark, but she missed it, lost it in the confusion and fear and the thud of her heart.

And she wanted to know. She really did, but she was afraid of going back. It was terrifying and exhilarating and confusing, and really she just wanted to be a normal college student, but, with a dad who ran a dream-sharing-extracting-what-the-hell-ever group, it was highly unlikely.

Damn.

So she painted.

She'd always been a good artist, with an eye for shapes and color, and painting relaxed her, calmed the storm of emotions that usually followed her around (stupid fucking hormones).

The painting of her dream was nice, was hazy and loose and it caught the mood—she stood in the sun and her father stood in the shadow of the clock tower while the clock's hands rested at three o'clock.

Nine-houred clocks, wildflowers, and fathers who had long ago disappeared.

It was bizarre.

Dreams apparently had deep symbolism, but how deep could the symbolism be if the dream was controlled by someone else?

Could her father, from his bed in the clinic, reach out and influence her dreams? Or did he need one of the whirring silver briefcases?

Her head hurt. Her mouth was dry, her hands shook, and her heart ached.

Stupid fucking dad. Stupid fucking James, for stealing. Stupid fucking Jefferson for going after her Grandpa, for pissing James off into retribution. (She still had no idea how he had managed to piss Jefferson off so spectacularly—clearly his last heist had involved a personal touch, as it were.)

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Phillipa grabbed a new, blank canvas and started to paint almost mindlessly—buildings rose from her brush, people swarmed the streets, and her clock tower struck three over a group of shadows that stood in a loose semi-circle.

One shadow had blue eyes and a gun in his hand.

The rest of the class passed swiftly for Phil as she painted, recreating her dream, trying to sift through the confusion.

It wasn't working, at all.

It was pissing her off, and soon she was a swirling mess of emotion, of anger and confusion and wonder, hope and sadness and frustration.

She hated having a uterus sometimes. _Men _certainly didn't experience so much emotion, all at once, fuck them.

This dreaming thing was horribly confusing.

She had spent the rest of the very early morning turning it over in her head, every little bit that had happened to her while she was in the warehouse with her uncles and her baby brother.

What they said in the Victorian village was impossible. People's minds touching like that, it was like something out of a sci-fi movie. Dreamshare had always been a hazy subject, even when it had been common knowledge. When she was little, Phil thought it had been rather primitive, like putting on 3-D glasses and watching the same movie as another person.

And that briefcase—Phil had seen it before. She _knew _she had seen if before, somewhere, a long time ago, but she couldn't put her finger on it, couldn't quite place it.

She had dreamed the same dream as Arthur, Eames, and James, at the same time, presumably in the same dream space, whatever the hell that was.

There was something called extraction—pulling information from someone's head, and her father and her mother had been involved in it.

Her parents, overcome by their curiosity, pushed and pushed until they fell into limbo, and that had broken something in them, in Mal.

Her strokes became angry, fast. The painting took a vicious shape.

Her hands shook. It was all a bit much, but Arthur and Eames and James (the douchebags), they had known something, had seen the same thing she had seen, so their minds did touch, which meant all of this was real.

It was painful to think about—the science was impossible, but not, obviously—and there was nowhere Phil could go, not really. She was stuck in San Fran, her ever-present and now thoroughly annoyed cop shadows sticking closer to her than ever.

Arthur and Eames had probably cleared out of the warehouse by now, taking her brother with them.

And, now that she had calmed down enough to think mostly coherently (earlier her thoughts had been _holy fucking shit holy fucking shit what is this this can't be real_), she need answers.

Curiosity and fear were mixed equally in her head, but this dreaming thing, it affected everyone now, even her.

For years she had kept her past out of her life, but now it was roaring back with a vengeance, because somehow everything was connected. Mentally, she tried to go through everything, sort it out into something resembling order.

Her mother had died because of dreaming, and a young cop named Matt Jefferson had investigated her death. For some reason, Jefferson had clung to her father's case and moved for Dom Cobb to be killed, even though he was in a coma. He had uncovered something about her dad, Phil knew it. She just didn't know what.

Dom Cobb was an extractor, or whatever, working in dreams, doing things that were questionably legal. He had fallen into a coma and didn't come out. His partners had scattered, occasionally dropping in on his now-orphaned children, who were being raised by their grandparents, one of whom creating the dreamshare technology in the first place.

James was an art thief, and Special Agent Matt Jefferson was hunting him down.

Everything was moving towards a final point, one absolute truth, Phil knew it. She could feel it.

She needed _answers, _but she wasn't crawling back to Arthur. She knew that he would tell her to dream with the briefcase again, and as scared of it as she was, she didn't know if she could resist I, could stay away.

There was something magical about the dreams, something that was sharp and beautiful and stunning, and she wanted it, wanted it badly.

There had to be someone she could go to…

Stepping back, Phil surveyed the painting.

It was darker than the first one, grittier, blacker.

The shadow-people were deep and dark, and the blue-eyed one loomed above them all like a monster, and the nine-houred clock struck three.

_Grand-mère! _The thought came to Phil suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, and she gasped audibly. Grand-mèrewould know, or at least her husband would, seeing as he created dreaming.

_Grand-mère and Grandpa, _she thought, with a touch of irony. _It all goes back. _

If Jefferson could plumb a man with Alzheimer's for information, so could Phil, and she could do it without upsetting her grandfather.

The familiar excitement that had been killed yesterday by the shock of the dream bubbled back to life, and Phillipa smiled grimly.

She was going to get answers.

She left the paintings on the easel, and somewhere, a clock struck three.

* * *

Three

_And the old made explicit, understood  
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,  
The resolution of its partial horror._

"Phillipa!" Mada smiled, throwing the door wide, reaching to touch her granddaughter's face. "We were not expecting you."

"Sorry to come without warning," she said apologetically, folding the frailer old woman in a gentle hug. "I just wanted to see you."

"_Non, non_, you do not need to apologize, it is very good to see you, c_hérie." _Mada kissed her granddaughter on the cheeks like a true Frenchwoman and pulled her inside the neat little house. "I am very glad you came," she told Phillipa. "What with James and all his nonsense."

"You heard?"

Mada's eyes glinted in a way that promised pain (for James, hopefully). "Who didn't hear? It is all over the news, the television. What is that boy thinking? Is he trying to bury this family in shame, as if we don't already have enough? That boy takes after his _father_." The woman spat the word like it was something particularly nasty that she had taken a bite of unexpectedly.

Mada did not like Dom Cobb in the slightest. Phillipa could understand that.

"Have you seen your brother?"

Phil nodded, not trusting that the house wasn't bugged, after Agent Jefferson had been there. _God, _she thought. _I'm turning into Uncle Arthur. _

Mada, sharp as ever despite being eighty-something, picked up on Phil's reluctance to talk and she scoffed. "There are no recorders, "bugs," you call them, here. When that _awful _federal agent came, I had the neighbor boy—sweet lad, though a bit dark, if you know what I mean—check. I do not trust . that man at all; he gives me the _willies_, I believe the word is."

"How's Grandpa?" Phillipa asked anxiously. "Jefferson didn't rile him up too bad, did he?"

The Frenchwoman tutted. "He is much better now. You heard, then? About the _interrogation?_"

"Yeah, James told me."

Mada shook her head sadly. "This Jefferson, he was terrible. Miles could not remember, he was getting confused and frustrated, but that man did not stop. I threatened to set the neighbor boy on him and he left, but Miles…"

Phillipa almost smiled at the worry her grand-mère showed for her husband. The two had had a turbulent marriage at the best of times—they were both so incredibly stubborn—and when Grandpa had been healthy, they fought constantly. She wondered if their daughter's death had anything to do with the deep rift between them.

And then he started to forget things. Phil had half-expected Mada to put him in a nursing home or an institution, but the old woman surprised her, and everyone, by moving in to Miles' home permanently.

She helped, Phil thought. She made sure that Miles was cared for and intellectually stimulated (the pair's dinner wars over 1960s politics were legendary) and they were far happier than Phil had ever seen them.

"I'm glad he's doing better," Phillipa said, relieved. "When I heard what Jefferson did to him…"

"It is very terrible," Mada agreed, and her eyes were sharp. "But that is not the real reason why you are here, is it? You want to know something, _chérie,_ I can see it in your eyes."

Phil took a deep breath and prayed that her grand-mère was in a tolerant mood. "I want to know what happened to my parents. What happened to mom."

Mada's crinkled face blackened, and Phil could sense rejection (and French cursing), could sense the anger bubbling below the surface.

She held up her hands pleadingly. "Just listen for a minute," she said. "When I saw James yesterday, Uncle Arthur and Uncle Eames were there—actually, Arthur came and _kidnapped _me, to try and talk."

Mada's scowl deepened.

"They… told me things," the younger woman murmured. "They said Mom killed herself."

Mada was as still as a statue, her face as if it was carved from stone. "Come into the kitchen," she said, after a long pause. "I will make you tea."

Phil knew better than to argue—Mada was fierce when needed—and dutifully followed the old woman into the clean, Spartan kitchen.

"Your grandfather is resting," she said shortly. "Otherwise I would let him answer your questions. He knows more about the mess than I, and the Alzheimer's has not taken it from him yet."

Phil kept quiet. She didn't know if Mada knew about the dreaming thing—Phillipa herself didn't know much, and how much of a part it played in her husband's life, and her daughter's.

"How much did your _uncles_—" (this word was also spat) "tell you?"

"Not much," Phil said, reluctant to go any farther in case her grand-mere decided that she had gone bat-shit crazy or something.

"He told you about the dreaming," Mada said, heavily, and it wasn't a question. She pressed a cup of tea into Phil's hands.

"You know about the dreaming thing? Phil asked, surprised.

Mada snorted. "How could I not, with Miles and Mallorie whispering about it under my nose? With your father and his _theories_? Of course I knew about it. Most mothers get to walk in and find their daughters having sex, but I walked in and I found my only child unconscious on the floor, a needle in her arm and that horrible machine whirring beside her.

"I thought she was dead. I thought my daughter, my precious, only child, was dead. I called Miles—we were still together at the time—and he came over and he sat me down, and he told me about his _research, _about his grand plans and his technology.

"I was terrified.

"Mallorie woke soon after that, and she and Miles explained it to me, most of it anyway—the _dreaming _and the building and the thrill of creation." Mada stared out the window at the quiet suburb.

"He offered to show me," she said lowly. "He offered to take me into his dream world and Mallorie begged me to go, to share this thing with her, but I said, _non_, no I will not do it."

"Why?" Phillipa asked, and she remembered the pulsing colors of the dream world, the vibrancy of it all. "Weren't you curious?"

Mada smiled again and Phil thought it was bitter. "Oh," she laughed, "I was curious. I am still curious, all these years later. I almost agreed to go, to see this place that they both loved, but I _knew_, Phillipa, I knew even then that this way of dreaming was not good."

Phil was silent, absorbing, her eyes wide.

"And I was right," Mada said, and vindictive triumph flickered across the deep lines. "My daughter had soon found that she could no longer dream on her own, that she couldn't dream without the aid of the machine."

"She couldn't dream?"

"She slept, but without the machine and the needle, she did not dream. I do not understand the science behind it, but the drug in the machine does something to the brain, messes with the patterns," Mada confirmed. "Her sleep was not true. I asked to stop using the machine, to wean off the drug, but that would have meant leaving her precious world."

"Somnacin," Phil remembered suddenly, thinking of Eames the night before. "Eames said that it is called somnacin."

"Yes, I asked her to wean herself off the somnacin. But she was too curious, you see. The world of dreams fascinated her and she would not leave it, no matter how much I begged and pleaded. She pushed, dreamed more and more, and from what I understand made a job out of it. And then she met your father," anger colored Mada's voice, and Phillipa recognized it as an old wound by the way her voice tightened and her hands curled around her teacup.

"Dominick was the same—a dreamer. Miles was his architecture professor, and he introduced him to the dreaming, and he took to it as well as your mother did." Mada shook her head. "After they married, I did not see much of either of them, or of you. They were always off in their own world, dreaming and dreaming, and they made it their profession, though exactly what that entailed I was never told. I doubt it was legal—your father always carried a gun."

Phillipa licked her lips, sixteen years of not knowing burning inside her. "Did dreaming—did it kill Mom?"

Mada stared out the window. "Yes," she said. "I believe it did. I do not know the specifics and I do not want to, but your parents did _something _and my daughter was never the same. She confused dreaming and life in her head and then she died."

"Did she—"

"Kill herself? Yes. Mallorie jumped from the thirtieth story, and she died. Instantly, I was told."

Phillipa felt sick. Her mother had committed suicide—sixteen years of doubts were resolved right there. Dreaming had driven her mad, had mixed dreams and reality until Mallorie Cobb threw herself out of a building.

_So Dad is innocent, _she thought, dazed. _Dad didn't do it. _

It was a bit like relief to finally know for sure, to know with absolute certainty that Dom Cobb didn't kill his wife.

"If you want to know more about dreaming, and I can tell that you do, you will have to ask your grandfather."

Phil started. "How do you know that I'm thinking about it?"

Mada smiled tiredly, her years worn into her face. "A mother always knows, _chérie_. Your own had that some look on her face, that determination, that curiosity. You are attracted to the dreaming, are you not? You had a little taste and you want to know more, to feel more."

Phillipa shifted guiltily, and she knew that it was true. There was so much to learn, to feel. Dreaming like that had been the most vivid thing she'd ever experienced, and she _wanted more_, goddamn it.

"He is in the sitting room, my dear." Mada reached out, cupping Phil's face in an old, withered hand. "Be careful, _chérie, _that you do not lose yourself like your parents did. I cannot lose another, and neither can your grandfather."

"I'll be careful," Phil promised, and right then she knew that she was going back. "I won't get lost."

Mada smiled and waved her granddaughter away, staring out the window, and Phil dropped her eyes and left her grandmother alone by the sink, the cup of tea untouched on the counter.

She didn't make it to the sitting room.

Something very big and very heavy hit the door at the exact moment she tried to cross the hallway, and the door splintered and groaned and shattered inwards.

Mada screamed.

Men armed to the teeth swarmed in, black-vested and bristling, and Phil stared, unable to move. Guns gleamed and voices bellowed and Grandpa tottered in, his eyes wide and confused and startled.

"Get on the ground!" Agent Jefferson boomed, bounding into the room like a demon out of hell. "Get on the ground _now!_"

"What's going on?" Phillipa screamed at him, over the noise of the men and the boots and Mada screaming.

Agent Jefferson's moustache was quivering with surpressed glee. "Phillipa Cobb," he said savagely. "You are under arrest for aiding and abetting a wanted criminal."

* * *

Four

_Time past and time future  
Allow but a little consciousness.  
To be conscious is not to be in time_

"You are fucking insane," Phillipa snarled, glaring viciously at Matthew Jefferson. The agent stood by the two-way mirror, grinning smugly.

"Language, Ms. Cobb," he said, positively gleeful. "I read you your rights—remember that anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."

She was sorely tempted to show him just how _vulgar_ she could be—God bless Ariadne and her dirty, dirty mouth—but common sense held her back. She didn't want to give Jefferson anything that he could use to hurt her or James any further.

"This is illegal," she finally hissed, glaring furiously at him. And it had to be; she was in a fucking interrogation room, with the concrete walls and the single bulb and the steel table (_s_ome_body_ had been watching too many old crime dramas, apparently). She hadn't _done _anything.

"I have a warrant for your arrest," Jefferson said, gesturing at the table, where the warrant lay. "You are a suspect in a federal investigation. Your behavior has been suspicious enough that the two federal officers trailing you believed you were harboring your criminal brother."

She narrowed her eyes dangerously and Jefferson smirked.

"You didn't know you were being followed?"

"Tell your boys," Phillipa said, slowly and clearly and very much in control. "They need to get a new car. That old Ford's ugly as sin and it's _obvious. _I live in a good neighborhood, dipshit. Crappy cars always draw attention."

Jefferson's face went dark. "Tell me where James is."

"So this is your grand plan, huh?" She glared. "Arrest me, threaten me, and hope that Jim'll give himself up?"

Jefferson grinned blackly. "Something like that," he agreed. "Your brother is smart, but where you're concerned, he gets a little _stupid. _We've used you before, you know." Smug, vicious pride colored his voice.

"How?"

"We were in Chicago," he said. "Three months ago, in July.

_July, _she thought, and closed her eyes.

"We leaked information that we had arrested you," Jefferson continued, pacing in front of the mirror. "That you were being detained, that your future was ruined."

"My phone was out," Phillipa said, making the connection. "And my internet was down."

"We cut your lines, so when he called you, you didn't answer. We blocked your internet so he couldn't email you. When even tinkered with your cell phone to prevent him from reaching you."

"Bastard, there's no way in _hell _that's legal," Phil snapped, itching to get a hold of Jefferson and _break his nose._

Jefferson shrugged. "You'd be surprised."

"But it didn't work," she said proudly. "You didn't catch James."

"We did, actually. James Cobb was in FBI custody for three hours and twenty-seven minutes."

"He escaped."

"Yes. But we _learned_, you see, how to catch him. James has one weak spot, Ms. Cobb, and that's _you_. So this time I actually arrested you. I went through your apartment, your studio, questioned your professors. Your future actually is on the line, Ms. Cobb. James will see that and this time he won't escape. We have him. And you."

"I haven't _done _anything!"

"I can make it look like you did," Jefferson said softly. "I can make you look like an accomplice."

"Now I _know_ that's illegal." Fury made Phillipa's head swim, anger curling heavy in her gut.

"But I don't want to," the agent continued, just as soft. "You haven't done a single illegal thing in your nineteen years of life. You're a good citizen, hardworking, you pay your bills. You've never even gotten a speeding ticket. It'd be a shame to but you in jail for your brother's stupidity."

"You're crazy."

"Listen," Jefferson said, and his eyes were glittering with honesty. "Think about your life, Phillipa. Your future. If you get kicked out of school, where will you go? If you go to prison you'll lose your inheritance, your apartment. Everything. Think. Tell us where James is, and we'll let you go."

Phillipa stared at him. He sounded almost _tender_, concerned, like he really did care, but that wasn't right because he was hunting James, was hurting him.

"Phillipa," the FBI agent said again, urgently.

She refused to meet his eyes.

"Mr. Jefferson," someone said frostily, and the door banged open and Arthur, all slim lines and killer grace in a dark Italian suit, swept in like he owned the place.

"_Agent _Jefferson," Jefferson snapped, instantly straightening, going stiff. He sensed another alpha male.

"_Mr. _Jefferson," Arthur replied darkly. "You started questioning my client without a lawyer present. She did _not _waive her right to a lawyer. You arrested her without proper reason and you terrorized an elderly woman and a man ill with Alzhiemer's."

"Who the fuck are you?"

"Mr. Charles," Arthur said coldly. "Ms. Cobb's lawyer. And I have an order from Judge Marne releasing Ms. Cobb from your custody."

"You can't do that," Jefferson growled.

"I can," said Arthur, and slapped the warrant on the table. "Release her."

For several long seconds, Jefferson didn't move, his silly moustache twitching fiercely. Then he very slowly leaned over and undid the handcuffs and Phillipa snatched them free, standing.

"Remember what I said," Jefferson murmured.

"Come," said Arthur, laying a hand on her shoulder. "You're free to go, Ms. Cobb."

"Thank you," she said, relief pulsing through her. Arthur's hands were heavy and warm on her shoulders.

They walked out of the interrogation room and into the station, leaving Jefferson gaping after them like a fish.

* * *

Five

_But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,  
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,_

The walk to Arthur's car—a Prius, predictably, even after twenty years they were still the best hybrid out there—was short and awkward and Phil kept glancing over her shoulder nervously, expecting Jefferson to come rushing out, foaming at the mouth.

"Eyes forward," Arthur said softly. "Don't look around. Don't act suspicious. We're being watched." He made the tiniest of motions with his head, carefully pointing out a camera mounted high on the wals, its little black lens staring, clicking.

"I'm going to prison, aren't I?"

Arthur's lip twitched. "Not if we have anything to say about it," he said. "Jefferson really has nothing to hold you on. He searched your apartment and didn't find any evidence. He searched your art studio—"

(Phillipa mentally imagined stabbing Jefferson with a paintbrush)

"—and talked to all your professors, but he hasn't found a single thing that will link your to James'… _activities_, especially recently. He had no right to arrest you."

"How'd he do it then?" Phil grumbled, itching to get out of the station. The various cops and agents were all staring at her darkly, hungry, it seemed, and angry. "He had a warrant."

"One of the judges in town owes Jefferson," Arthur explained. "Jefferson caught the man who murdered this judge's daughter. All he had to do was ask and he had a warrant."

"He really likes manipulating people, doesn't he?"

"Eames says he's compensating for the size of his penis."

Phil choked. "And how does Eames know the size of Jefferson's penis?"

Arthur turned to give Phillipa a deep, blank look, the kind a shark gave a particularly poor, injured fish. "Eames knows everything," he said flatly. "Especially the size of a man's penis. He can _tell_. It's rather frightening."

"Ah," she said, and thought that maybe it was time to invest in therapy.

Arthur pushed open the door and Phil looked back once, nervously, half-expecting Feds to come flying after her. Agent Jefferson stood at the end of the hallway, his face dark and promising, and Arthur gently dragged her out into the open air and towards his car.

"Of course you drive a Prius," she muttered, trying to crush the nervousness tingling in her stomach.

"Prii are good cars," Arthur said defensively. "They're very quiet and they're good for the environment."

"I know, Uncle Arthur, I know." She had, sadly, heard several of her classmates and professors preach the benefits of eco-cars before.

"Get in," he said, and she rolled her eyes and did. "Buckle up. We're going to be moving pretty fast, and I don't want to kill you if we wreck."

"Wait, _kill _me?" Phillipa's voice rose several octaves. "Oh _fuck _no, this is insane, I'm _leaving_."

A hand grabbed her arm, pulling her back firmly. "You need to stay in the car, Pippa. Jefferson's going to set a tail on us, and I have to get you back with the family."

"You're asking me," she said, slowly and clearly. "To get in a car and get involved in a high speed chase."

"Yes," Arthur replied, and started the car. It hummed to life.

"No no no, I am _not _doing this with you. Jefferson is better, this is crazy—" She struggled to open the door but it was locked.

Arthur had the decency to look a little apologetic. "I'm sorry," he said. "Too late." And he spun out of the parking lot and into traffic.

"Oh _fuck_." Phillipa hissed, grabbing the door handle and hanging on. "You are fucking _crazy._"

Dark eyes flicked to her in the rearview mirror. "Be glad Yusuf isn't driving." In the mirror, she say to nondescript cars trailing several cars behind. Arthur had seen them too.

"Hold on." With a sharp movement he spun the wheel leaping through two lanes and whipping around a corner. Horns blared loudly and angry faces hurtled past. Phil gripped the side of the car to steady herself, swearing under her breath.

_Does dreamshare make all people crazy? _She thought. _Mom was suicidal, Dad was a greif-stricken psycho, Arthur's bat-shit, _I'm _going bat-shit… _

Unfortunately she didn't have time to think about anything else—the two cars had also leaped two lanes of traffic and were following closer now, their windows dark and tinted. Arthur, seeing them, allowed himself a small, tight smile most often seem on angry dogs and flicked the wheel casually.

The Prius lurched, thundering down a smaller road and barreling up another, rising with the shape of San Francisco. The two cars followed, picking up speed, and Arthur accelerated, shooting out of one of the smaller streets and into a bigger one.

Several drivers jerked in surprise, peeling to the side. Phillipa laughed hysterically at the big SUVs that shied away from a little tiny Prius and Arthur shot her a worried glance.

"I'm going to kill you," she told him cheerfully. "If we don't die first."

Another twist of the wheel sent the car speeding down the road, weaving determinedly in and out of cars. The two undercovers had figured it out by now; they were accelerating, weaving just as determinedly, staying four or five cars behind.

"Can Jefferson arrest us for this kind of thing?" She ground out, clinging to the Oh Shit Bar desperately. "If you say yes, Uncle Arthur…"

"We're not going to get caught," Arthur said calmly, cutting off a Hummer with the vindictive pleasure of an eco-nut. "And after all this is over, Jefferson will leave you alone, you and James both."

"Wait, what?" She tore her eyes from the road and the cars that were getting uncomfortably close.

"I'll explain when we get there," Arthur muttered, and he sent the Prius lunging through an open space, slipping around behind a semi truck and shooting up and around.

There was a screech of brakes, and a horrible squealing groan, and Phil screwed her eyes shut as the terrible crunch of metal-on-metal rang and behind the Prius there was rolling heat and crumpling metal.

"It's okay," Arthur said gently. "One of the feds tried to follow—the semi pushed it into the guardrail. There's some damage but it's not too bad, he should be okay."

"Jesus," she said, and opened her eyes. Traffic had stopped behind them; the semi had slid to a halt and the fed's car was slumped along the side of road, bits of metal strewn behind it. There was smoke drifting into the air and the other dark, unmarked car slipped to a stop beside it, the fed inside leaping out to check on his partner.

Arthur accelerated, sliding through another few cars until he was sure that they weren't being followed.

"Jesus," Phillipa repeated, her head thunking against the cool leather interior of the car. "You're worse than the mafia."

Arthur's lip twitched.

The Prius sped along the highway, and soon lights started to twinkle in the distance as night began to fall, turning the dark clouds even darker, muting the glow of the trees.

"Where are we going?" Phillipa tried, after a long time of sitting in the silence and tyrying to keep her breathing steady, determined to pry at least something from her stoic companion and soothe the burning curiosity, just a little.

"Warehouse."

"Okay?"

Arthur nodded, his body language clearly saying _you're not getting any more out of me, little girl, so don't even try_, and with a barely suppressed sigh, she fell silent.

The rest of the ride passed in complete and total quiet, something she was grateful for—she preferred the silence to idle conversation, because it was clear that Arthur wasn't giving anything away until they were safe and secure, in a place he knew that they wouldn't be overheard.

He was a little paranoid, she decided.

The rest of the ride passed uneventfully. The trees were a steady line of golden fire on either side and the undercover car followed, it's dull hood the same color as the slate sky. It was rather anticlimactic, not that she expected a another car chase or anything, but still, cops had been trailing her and she thought that it, since Arthur caused one fed to wreck, others would be after him.

The sky had gone completely black by the time the Prius pulled up in front of a non-descript gray warehouse that stood in a row of non-descript gray warehouses, and she stepped out and made purposely for the door.

"Not that one," Arthur called, and made his own way down the row, weaving complex patterns as he wandered around and ended up in front of yet another non-descript gray warehouse.

Phil stared at him.

"We won't be followed," he said simply, and pushed open a side door, tucking a key back into his vest pocket.

She stared some more.

"What?"

"Paranoid bastard," she muttered, and followed him into the warehouse, her eyes adjusting to the deep shadow, the almost-gray light.

She was almost tempted to shout "Hello!" and see how many times it echoed, but something about the way Arthur stood beside her, all straight limbs and alert eyes, advised her against it.

His fingers reached for the inside of his vest—holy shit, the man was _armed_—and the need to know was slightly diminished by the need to not get shot.

"Uncle Arthur—"

She hissed, but he _shhed _her violently and pulled a gun—holy shit holy shit she should have stayed at her apartment—and carefully, quietly checked it.

"Stay with me," he breathed, and she did, sticking to his side like a burr.

The older man (who carried guns, holy fuck he _was _Mafioso, dreamshare was just another little part of that) prowled through the darkened warehouse, and Phil could feel him go tight with tension and anticipation.

There was a soft rustling noise, still muted, and a series of clicks—_one-two-three-four-fi-five _—an odd rhythm, and Arthur relaxed.

"It's okay, Phil," he reassured her, and tucked his gun back into his vest.

Phillipa stared at him, because now she was mostly convinced that her dad ran a mafia organization.

"Ah, Arthur! Hello, darling."

Eames padded from the shadows, flicking on the lights. They buzzed, loudly, and suddenly the warehouse was illuminated.

"I see you've got Phillipa," he continued, smiling at her. She sort of smiled back, completely aware that it wasn't very friendly, but hey she was more than a little traumatized by the fact that her favorite calm, composed, sensible uncle carried a gun and knew how to use it, not to mention the fact that he apparently was very, very adept at car chases and losing FBI tails.

"What the hell," she muttered, and she thought her heart might actually stop.

"Arthur, you've scared her." A gentler voice reprimanded, and Ariadne stood up and came to stand in front of Phil, smiling. "Hey, Phillipa," she said, and promptly crushed the younger (and slightly taller) woman into a hug.

For the first time since her "kidnapping," Phillipa smiled a genuine smile and hugged her aunt back fiercely. "I wish you had come to get me," she muttered into Ariande's ear. The little woman giggled.

"Technically, I'm not even in the country," she said apologetically. "And I don't have a readily-available fake identity like Arthur here."

Ariadne pulled back and looked up into Phil's face, smiling sympathetically. "Rough day, huh?"

"Rough couple of days."

"I get it," Ariadne said, and Phillipa had the chance to study her. In the last two years or so since they'd actually seen each other face-to-face, the diminutive woman hadn't changed much. There were a few strands of gray in her hair, a few little lines in her forehead, but all in all, she didn't look old at all. She was the youngest of the group, Phil knew; she was only in her thirties now, still a younger professor, and, subsequently, Phil's favorite.

"How are you?" She asked, and Ariadne laughed a little.

"Better than you," she said teasingly. "Just got my tenure renewed—I'll be tormenting young architects for another decade, at least."

"That's great!"

"What do you _mean_ you got in a car chase!" Eames' hysterical voice cut off Ariadne's reply and the two women turned, startled. "Are you _crazy?_"

Arthur arched an eyebrow. "Relax," he said. "No one died, we lost the tail, everything's okay."

"I can fix the charges if anything comes up anyway," a third male voice added, and Phil realized that Saito was in the warehouse too, and she smiled and waved to him.

Saito was a Japanese businessman, and the third richest person in the world. He was her father's age, fifty, and he was almost completely gray, but he had a vivid spring in his step and a commanding _look at me! _air that felt like something a younger man would have.

"Is the whole "family" here?" Phillipa asked Ariadne, putting air quotes around "family."

Ariadne smiled. "Yusuf's on his way in as we speak," she said. "There's something big going on here, Phil. We're just waiting for Jim to get back before we get started."

"You got in a car chase!" Eames repeated, and Phillipa almost felt bad for him. "You could've _died_—"

"What about all the crazy shit you've pulled on me over the years, huh?" Arthur snapped back. "Remember Santiago, twelve years ago? The sniper on the roof?"

"I can't believe you're bringing that up, I did it to save _your _arse—"

"My arse was just fine, thanks—"

"You ungrateful little—"

"If you keep watching," James said in Phillipa's ear, "they should start making out any second."

"Jesus," she swore, jumping, and he laughed.

"You idiot," she hissed, hugging him tightly (so tightly that he wheezed, but hey) and glaring at him. "You so owe me, by the way. Jefferson is a _bastard._"

"Isn't he?"

"How's Grand-mère? And Grandpa? That must have been horrible for them."

"Grandpa's alright. We moved them to a safe house, for the time being. I was just there. Grand-mère is fit to choke a bitch. She was asking for you. I told her you'd drop by later, when this was settled."

"Speaking of settling this," Ariadne cut in gently. "As much as I'd like to catch up with you, Phil, we have some work to do if this is going to work."

"If what's going to work?"

The various assorted criminals (and they were criminals, there was no doubt about that) turned to face her, determination carved into their faces.

"You know about extraction, right?" Ariadne asked.

Phillipa nodded sourly. "Yeah. Arthur told me last night."

"Did he take you dreaming?"

"Yes." She remembered it clearly, every little detail, the flowers the tower the city her father, and she ached and burned to stay away and to try it again.

"Alright, so if extraction is stealing secrets, logically there must be a reverse side, right?"

Phil tilted her head. "You're talking about… planting ideas?"

"Very good! Yes, planting ideas into the mark's head. It's called inception."

"That can't be possible, though." Phil argued. "I've read Psychology books—genuine ideas, genuine inspiration, that's something that comes from oneself. Other people can _influence _it, but the person always knows where the idea comes from. It should work that way in dreams, right?"

"She's a clever one, this one," Eames laughed, his argument with his lover put on a temporary hold. "Inception is possible, it's just bloody difficult. The extractors—inceptors, in this case—have to go deep enough and _simple _enough for the idea to stick. You can't put an idea like "_I'm going to murder the President_" in someone's head—it's too complex. There's too many motives to consider, to many variables to deal with. But if you simplify that idea, take it down to, say _"I hate the President because he is racist_," there you go. That hate will grow and turn into violence. _Voila. _Inception."

"We're going to incept Matthew Jefferson," Arthur explained. "We're going to plant the idea that he needs to let go of your father's case, of James."

Phillipa frowned. "How will that help, though? Jimmy's still a criminal."

"I can fix that," Saito said smoothly.

"Of course you can."

"We're going to build a dream," Ariadne said. "And we're going to take him deep so we can plant the idea."

"And…?" Phillipa didn't like where this conversation was going.

"We'd like you to come with us," Arthur said. "To help us incept Jefferson."

"To dream with you," she said. "You want me to go into Jefferson's head with you."

"Yeah." James rubbed the back of his neck, somewhat sheepishly. "It's kinda sudden, Phil, but we need your help."

"Why me?" For the second time that day, her voice took on a hysterical pitch. "I've only done it _once_, how can I help?"

"You're curious," Arthur said, his dark eyes gentle. "You want it again, I can see it, we all can see it. You want to dream, you want it to _end_, all of this, all this shit with your father, with the past. If you help us, if you make sure the inception works, Jefferson will be gone. The past will be _gone._"

_Gone, _she thought, staring into Arthur's eyes. If they incepted Jefferson, made him let it go, then he would leave.

He would leave James alone. He would leave them alone, and Dad's crimes would die with him. She would be free of him, of his blue-eyed shadow standing underneath the clock tower.

Free.

"Okay," she said. "I'll help you."

Arthur smiled. "Let's begin."

_The moment in the draughty church at smokefall  
Be remembered; involved with past and future.  
Only through time time is conquered._


	3. part iii

**Inception big_bang fic. **

**Dedicated to paintedsongs, iheartfluffy, Molly, Sam, Crystal, and Jim. **

**Disclaimer: I do not own Inception or _Burnt Norton._**

* * *

Part III

_Here is a place of disaffection  
Time before and time after  
In a dim light: neither daylight  
Investing form with lucid stillness_

* * *

One

_Only a flicker  
Over the strained time-ridden faces  
Distracted from distraction by distraction  
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning_

"Dreaming is an art," Ariadne says, walking beside Phillipa. The world surges and heaves and blooms around them, settling, taking shape. "It's a science, sure, but it's an art."

Great Gothic buildings, cathedrals, towers, settle, vicious gargoules bursting open-mouthed from stone walls. Cobbled streets twist maddeningly, turning the world into a dark ball of Gothic architecture, twisted and tangled on itself, lined with dark-eyed people. Sunlight streams multicolored from stained glass windows, dappling the two women as they walk.

"It's creation," Ariadne continues, and a fountain, strong and square, grinds out of the ground, gargoyles baring their teeth as water streams from their mouths. "Pure, constant creation."

"What are they?" Phil asks, jerking her head towards the dark, beady people gathered beside the streets, their faces turned red and green and blue by the stained light.

Ariadne smiles. "Projections," she says. "Physical representations of your subconscious."

"Mine?"

"You're the subject right now, and I'm the dreamer. The dreamer creates the world of the dream and the subject comes in and fills it with their mind—the projections. We can get information by talking to projections, since they, as representations of the subconscious, know everything the subject knows."

"Why are they staring at you?" Phillipa's watching her projections and they are string at Ariadne oddly. Tension ripples in their shoulders.

"They sense that something's weird with me. I shifted the dream and it drew their attention. Projections are kind of like the antibodies of the mind—they seek out foreign invaders—me, in this case—and destroy them."

"They _kill _you?" She tries not to remember her father stepping from the shadow of a clock tower and shooting Arthur and Eames.

Ariadne nods. "Yeah. They mob, swarm the extractor. Usually, we prefer to kill ourselves before they catch us—much quicker and considerably less painful—and either way, the dream starts to collapse once the dreamer is dead. We wake up back top, completely unharmed."

"Wait, I thought _I _was the dreamer."

"You're the subject," Ariadne corrects. "The mark. I'm the dreamer right now, maintaining the dream. I hold it together and you fill it."

"And then you steal from me."

"Well, it _is_ illegal. I can also change the dream—" to prove her point, a huge, growling gargoyle exploded from its arch to spread its stone wings gruesomely—"but _you _can't, at the moment."

Frowning, Phillipa tries to reach out, to grab hold of the walls and _pull_. She can feel it—slippery, hard—but she can't grab it, can't make it move.

The projections shift, their eyes sharp and hungry.

"Later, I'll be the subject. You can try your hand at building then."

Phillipa nods slowly. "Can anyone build?"

"I've never met anyone who can't," the professor says. "Most can build basic structures, at least. What I'm doing, however, is a little more complex. It's my specialty, Architecture. People like me build the dreams into mazes that can be as small as a single floor of a building or as big as a city."

"Why a maze?"

"So the projections can't find us." Ariadne turns a corner and the colored light casts funny shadows. "Since the subject doesn't know the layout of the maze, neither do the projections, so they have to search. It lets extractors hide long enough to do the job."

The street is gradually slanting upwards. Phil's legs are shaking, starting to hurt.

"How can dreams feel so real?" She gasps, short of breath. "It feels like we're actually going up a hill. The level of detail is incredible."

"Part of it is the somnacin," Ariadne says, grinning. "Especially the type we use. Yusuf is a Chemist—he specializes in the chemical compounds used to dream. He tailors compounds just for us, and his version of somnacin sharpens the dream until it's so clear it feels real."

"What's the other part?"

Something painful flashes across the older woman's face. "Dreams," Ariande says slowly. "Feel real to us while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was strange."

Phil is silent for a minute, focusing on the slanting cobblestones.

"So you and Yusuf have specialties," she says after a time. "What about Uncle Arthur and Eames?"

"Eames' speciality is what we call Forgery. He can make himself appear as someone else in the dream."

Phillipa squints in confusion.

Ariadne giggles. "Your dad used to do that," she says fondly. "Whenever something confused or annoyed him he'd squint at it, like he was trying to make it go away."

Something uncomfortable squirms next to Phillipa's heart.

"You don't like to talk about him, do you?"

"No, not really," Phil says softly.

"You're mad at him," It's not a question.

"Yeah, I guess." Anger hardens in Phil's throat. She's not guessing—she's furious with her father. "He fucking _left _us."

Ariadne sighs. "Come here," she says, and a stone bench rises from the cobblestones. "Sit."

Phil sits.

"I knew your dad," Ariadne starts slowly. "For about a month. Miles introduced us. Your dad was working with Arthur and Eames at the time. They were trying to perform inception on a man named Robert Fischer. They needed an Architect."

"I thought Dad was one."

"That's how he started out. Arthur tells me that he was very, very good. But after your mother died, he stopped building and became an extractor."

"Why'd he stop?"

"Your mom," Ariande says slowly, carefully, her face blank and still. "Didn't go away after she died, not for Cobb. He carried her projection with him, when he dreamed. He couldn't let her go. She was… violent, to say the least. The second I dreamed, she stabbed me in the stomach, and she had a particular fondness for shooting Arthur in the knee. She—your dad, really, since she was part of him—couldn't know the mazes because then Mal would show up, ruin the job. It was too dangerous for him to build, so he found me."

Phillipa watches the gargoyles. They're not moving but they're so clear and sharp they could be.

"I knew your dad for a month," Ariadne says. "And during that time, d'you know the one thing he wanted the most was?"

"Mom back?"

Ariadne smiles. "No. He wanted you."

The only sound in the dream is the now-distant fountain, bubbling and gurgling.

"You and James," she continues. "I saw his dreams once—not that he wanted me too, but still—and he kept kicking himself, kept hurting himself, watching himself leave you over and over and over. He kept trying to see your faces, kept trying to call out to you, but he couldn't change anything."

Phillipa is quiet, listening to the fountain. "So why didn't he come back?" She says, very lowly. There's an ache in her chest that makes her want to cry. She won't cry over her father, she hasn't since she was twelve. "Uncle Arthur says he fell into limbo."

"During the Fischer job, your mom found us. She killed Fischer, the mark, under heavy sedation. He couldn't wake up so he dropped into limbo and your father and I followed him. We couldn't leave him. Saito had been injured a few levels up and he died and fell too." Ariadne blinks and Phil can see the fog of old memories swirl in front of her eyes.

"We found Fischer in limbo. Mal was there. I got Fischer and kicked out, but your dad stayed find Saito. We all woke up on the plane and Saito woke soon after. Cobb had found him. Saito thought he was right behind him, but your dad wasn't."

"He stayed.

Ariadne smiles and it's sad. "Yes," she says. "He didn't wake up. We tried to go after him but we never found him. Limbo is a huge place, an infinite place. We tried, but it was useless. So we left him."

Phil sits next to her aunt, listening to the fountain. _He deserved it_, she thought. _He deserved to be lost_. The bitterness in her chest is fire.

There's a soft, faint sound, from the depths of the dream. Music floats through the Gothic city, made haunting and lonely by the high, color-stained walls.

"It's almost time," Ariadne says, and her eyes are red. "Phillipa, look at me."

Reluctantly, Phil does.

"I will always regret leaving your father," she says, firmly, grabbing her shoulders. "And he will always, always regret leaving you."

The city is quaking now, great buildings crumbling, stained glass exploding. The stone gargoyle Phillipa is watching tumbles to from his perch, his slate-gray wings spread in flight, jaws snapping at the air.

It hits the ground and shatters.

"How can you be so sure?" Phillipa shouts, and the rumble of the dream drowns her out.

Ariadne smiles and falls through the earth and she's gone.

Phillipa staggers, spinning, colored glass ripping into the stones and gargoyles are falling, falling.

Light, turned white, free of the glass, flares, sharp and she cries out—

* * *

Two

_Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind  
That blows before and after time,  
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs_

She woke gasping.

"Easy," Ariadne was beside her, hands on Phil's shoulders, comforting. "It's a bit of a shock, having a dream collapse on you like that."

"That happened because you died?" Phil gasped. Her shaking hands curled into claws around the arms of the lawn chair.

"Very good," Ariadne said approvingly. "Partly. We ran out of time on the PASIV; the somnacin stopped flowing. I left the dream and so, as the builder was gone, it collapsed."

Phil's legs felt like jelly, weak and trembling and unsteady.

"You're okay, right?"

"Yeah," Phillipa muttered, blinking owlishly, trying to stop seeing blurring colors and stained-glass light.

Ariadne rocked back on her heels, chewing her lip. "You'll need a totem," she said.

"A what?"

"Totem." The Architect pulled a little golden bishop from her pocket and held it up so Phil could see. "An object that has a specific weight only you know. We use them to keep track of reality—your mom's idea, by the way. In a dream, this," she shook the bishop, "falls only in the direction it wants to. In reality, it only falls one way. Arthur has a loaded die, Eames has a poker chip, and so on."

"What did Dad have?"

"A top," Ariadne murmurs. "A pewter top. It never fell in a dream, just kept spinning and spinning. He got it from your mom when she died."

Phil was quiet.

"Arthur'll be here soon with a box of your things. Pick an item from them that's small and special to you, that only you know the feel of. No one else should touch your totem, okay? It's for you and only you."

"Okay," said Phil, and Ariadne smiled gently.

"I know it's a lot to handle, Pippa," she said. "I know it's confusing and scary and addictive. But you're a tough girl. You'll be okay." She hugged her tightly. "If you ever need to talk, I'm here."

"I know," Phillipa said, smiling a watery smile.

"Good girl." Ariadne stood. "Let's eat," she said. "We can start on basic structure later, see if you have a knack for it."

"How many specialties are there?"

"Not as many as there used to be. Back before Palin and her Dreamless laws, there were dozens of specialties. The business was booming and any skill could be used. Now though, only the main areas are left. Artchitecture, Forgery, Chemistry, Point."

"Point?"

"Basically, the Point runs the whole operation. He or she plans, researchers, and checks to make sure the job is safe in every aspect and well-prepared on all levels. It's what Arthur does. He's the best in the business."

"Point Man!" She said suddenly, remember what she heard that one day. Ariadne nodded.

"That's what he's called. Extraction's a specialty too."

"Is inception."

"You could say that. It's remarkably difficult, but it's doable. I've done it twice, Arthur three times, and Eames four because he never learned when to retire."

Phillipa soaked up this information. "Does James have a specialty yet?"

"Nope. He only started dreaming a bit before you; he's still learning the ropes." Ariadne pulled a box of leftover lo mein from the mini fridge. She wasn't really big on the whole cooking thing.

"After you learn the basics, Arthur will see if you've got an architectural knack. If you do, he'll teach you paradoxes. If not, he'll test for other talents."

Phillipa nodded. "I think I'm going to take a nap," she said. "I'm a little tired. I've been running around for days. Wake me up when Arthur gets back?"

"Sure," said the Architect, around a mouthful of day-old lo mein. "Use the office in the back. There should be a cot back there."

"Thanks." Phil left her aunt with her Chinese and made her way through the warehouse.

Uncle Saito was speaking into his phone in rapid Japanese, a hand shoved deep into his coat pocket.

Yusuf, who had arrived last night, was bent over a sleeping Eames and James. He saw Phillipa and smiled gently, his wire-gray hair sticking out at mad, curly angles. She was strongly reminded of the time he set the guest room on fire.

James and Eames were spending more and more time together, dipping deep into dreams. Arthur was out.

Phillipa walked past all of them and into the back office and closed the door. It was a small, dark space, a cot tucked into one corner, neatly folded blankets piled on top with Arthur's handiwork all over them. It looked comfortable enough, and with a heavy sigh, Phil flopped down and stared up at the darkened ceiling.

Ariadne's words were ringing in her head, _he will always regret always regret always always. _Her dad had left her when she was just three, too young to remember _him_, all of him. She had bits of him, knew little things but her dad was a shadow, a tiny little speck of what she could have had.

She still hated him for it, a little. It wasn't his fault, according to Ariadne. He had wanted to come back. _But it wasn't enough. _He hadn't wanted it enough—some part of Dom Cobb had chosen to stay with his dead wife in limbo. He had stayed away from his kids, had stayed, had kept himself from them.

They, she, had lost him. She'd grown up without a dad, without a father in her life to guide her, protect her.

It sucked.

She glared mutinously up at the ceiling.

_Why'd you have to fall into limbo, huh? _She thought.

Dom Cobb didn't answer.

And then Phillipa got an Idea.

* * *

Three

_Time before and time after.  
Eructation of unhealthy souls  
Into the faded air, the torpid  
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London_

"You ready for this?" Ariadne asked, a silver needle gleaming in her hands. "Once you start, you'll have to die if you want to wake up."

"I'm ready," she said, assuring. "You said I needed to learn the basics, right?"

"Right." Ariadne pressed a few buttons and the PASIV (the name of the machine) whirred, humming to life. "Okay, Pippa, when I put this needle in, I want you to imagine a place, okay? Not something you've seen here, in reality, but something new. Your mind should try to replicate that image and make it a world."

Phil nodded, determined. "Okay," she said. "Shoot."

Ariadne smiled. "I'll be there right after you," she said. "I'll give you half an hour by yourself and then I'm coming in to show you some tricks and see if you've got the stuff."

"Okay," Phil said again, and Ariadne carefully slid the needle into her skin and pressed the bright button. The PASIV buzzed, and the edges of Phillipa's vision went black.

With all her might, she pictured a field of wildflowers and a wide blue sky, and she heard, very faintly, a clock strike three.

She slept.

She opens her eyes and she's standing in the field of wildflowers and tall, waving grass. It tickles her bare skin and her white summer dress swirls in the wind.

She's dreaming, and she actually made it do what she wanted.

Delight floods her blood and the sun turns up a little brighter, mirroring her happiness.

_I did it! _She thinks, triumphant. She laughs and the dream echoes it back in birdsong even though she can't see any birds. The grass tickles a little and she walks, eager to see what else she could do, if she could change the dream like Ariadne.

She climbs to the top of a hill and looks out at the endless field, rolling and alive with flowers. She can't see her clock tower, and she sees an opportunity.

Like she did in Ariadne's Gothic city, she reaches out, feeling the edges of the dream, slippery, hard, and this time she grabs them, digging her metaphorical fingers in and _pulling_.

There's a sound like a sigh and the dream _gives_—there's no other way to describe it—and from the ground the clock tower bursts up, blooming, stone and glass and gold glinting, just a little, in the light.

It settles itself on the hill and, as if announcing its presence, strikes three. She laughs because she's done it.

The tower is real and solid and in a dream and _she put it there. _It's hers.

"That's fucking great!" Ariadne is there in the dream suddenly, stumbling a little and grinning. "Wow, Phil!"

"You like it?" She can't keep her happiness out of her voice.

"It's _excellent_," the professor says, walking in a quick circle around it. "Very good for your first time."

"I've dreamed about it before," Phillipa admits, and Ariadne flaps her hand.

"Not the point. The point is that you could recreate it."

"What was your first?"

Ariadne grins. "I folded Paris in half."

"That's…. different?"

"Pissed the hell out of your dad's projections." Ariandne's eyes are dark with the memory. "That was the dream when Mal stabbed me."

"Did it hurt?"

"It always does."

Phil is quiet for a moment. "Wanna go in?"

Ariadne the Architect studies the clock tower, her eyes shaded against the glare of the sun. "Sure," she says. "Why not?"

Phil grins. There's a door on the side of the tower because she wants it to be there, and inside the stone she can hear shifting, creaking, as she imagines stairs and the tower makes them.

With a shove, the door comes open. Inside, the tower is dimly lit and stairs spiral high over her head, dusty and wooden and ancient. At the top, she thinks there will be a room and the clock is actually a window, and whoever looks out can see the whole world spread below them.

Laughing, she runs up the stairs, her feet making the wood groan and creak. Ariadne follows slower, tamer, too caught up in the architecture to run.

It takes a few minutes. The tower is big enough that the steps are steep and there are a lot of them, and by the time Phillipa reaches the brown wooden trapdoor she's gasping. But it's a good burn because she built this, and she gets to climb it and how many people can say that?

Without even pausing, she pushes the trapdoor open and clambers up into the room she imagined. Sunlight streams through, turning the wood golden, and tiny flecks of dust float and glitter in the air. Her clock is a window, clear as glass, and she can see the backwards numbers and the hands that tick tick tick, but she can't see the world past it, because it's blocked by a familiar shape.

"Phil," Dom Cobb says, and turns around. The light makes his eyes go gray. "It's nice up here."

Her breath sticks in her throat.

_He always regretted leaving you_, says Ariadne, somewhere in the depths of Phil's mind.

_He didn't kill your mother. _

"Dad," she says, and she's proud that her voice is even and steady. "Why are you here?"

He shrugs his broad shoulders. "You want me here," he tells her. "I'm a projection of your subconscious."

"I know," she says.

"Ariadne's teaching you to build. You're going to help with a job."

"With inception."

There's a funny look on her dad's face, and she realizes that he's squinting. "Yeah," he says. "Inception."

Phillipa can't look away. "You shot Arthur and Eames," she says. "They were your friends."

"I'm not real, Phil," he reminds her. "I'm just a projection. They were hurting you, so I ended it. That's what projections do."

"They weren't hurting me."

"Then why did I attack them?"

_Because you're bad_, she wants to tell him. _Because you left and you hurt people, that's what you do. That's what you did. _

"Phil?" Ariadne's voice floats from the open trapdoor, getting closer and closer. The Parisian is coming up the stairs.

"Will you shoot her?" Phil asks, and her father smiles, sharply, eyes glittering.

"We'll see," he says, and he leans against the clock-window, his body blocking the flowers.

"Phil," Ariadne says, and she pokes her head through the trapdoor. It takes her about a second to see Cobb standing in the sunlight, and she swallows, convulsively. "Hello," she says carefully, and comes to stand beside Phil.

"Ariadne," he says, and he doesn't sound threatening. He sounds like a man greeting an old friend. "You've grown up."

"I kind of was, when I met you," she points out quietly, and she grabs Phillipa's hand as if to say _it's okay, I'm here._

Another smile, teeth glittering. "True," Dom agrees. He looks directly at Phillipa. "She says you're teaching her Architecture."

"She's good at it," Ariadne says. "She's going on a job with us; she needs to learn."

"I'm not really in a position to tell her that she can't, now am I?" There's a harsh note in his voice. "Don't let her get hurt. Stay away from limbo."

"I know, Dad," Philli[a says suddenly. "I'm smarter than you think."

He looks at her, long and hard, and the light from the clock-window breaks over his shoulders, hiding his face in deep shadow, except for his glittering eyes.

"Maybe," he says lowly. "Maybe."

And he's just gone.

"Phillipa," Ariadne speaks, her hand an iron vice around Phil's arm. "Just exactly how long has this been going on?"

She is silent, ready to retreat inside herself, to bury it deep and never touch it again.

Ariadne is having none of that. "Phillipa," she says sternly. "Phil, look at me. Look at me right the fuck now."

Phil does.

"Your dad," the Architect says. "Is not real. He is gone, do you understand? What you saw was—"

"A projection, I know." Phillipa can't stop looking at the clock-window. Now that her father's gone, she can see the flowers, stretching endlessly in either direction.

"You know?" Relief flickers across Ariadne's face. The light makes her look older than she is, or maybe it's the dream.

"Yeah."

"How long has this been happening?"

Phil looks her aunt in the eye, hard. "The first time was after Arthur and Eames drugged my tea. I came here, and he showed up. It happened again when I used the PASIV the first time. Dad shot Uncle Arthur and Eames."

"You're sure those are the only times?"

"It's been years," she says.

Ariadne touches her face, gently. "Pippa," her voice is quiet in the stillness of the room. The only noise is the tick of the clock, like a slow heartbeat. "I'm so sorry."

"Don't be," Phillipa says. "It's not your fault."

"I know." Ariadne pulls her into a hug, tightly. They stand in the sun-strewn room and watch the field of flowers until the dream collapses.

* * *

Four

_Descend lower, descend only  
Into the world of perpetual solitude,  
World not world, but that which is not world,_

When Phillipa woke up, her eyes were gritty. Ariadne was no where to be seen; the needle that had been in her arm was swinging crazily, abandoned. Yusuf was coming over, a bottle of antiseptic in one hand and a rag in the other, muttering under his breath about AIDS and illness and crazy Architects.

Eames and James were awake, talking together in low voices around a whiteboard.

Arthur was back.

Rubbing the heel of her hand across her eyes she stood, carefully pulling the needle out.

"Here," Yusuf said, not unkindly. "I've already got the antiseptic."

Phil smiled at him and said thank you—it was hard to be upset when Yusuf was around, because he was sweet and wacky and too well-intentioned for his own good. Arthur worried about him, sometimes, but Phil thought he was a good man.

He also gave very nice hugs.

Leaving him with his precious PASIV and cleaning supplies, she stiffly made her way to James and Eames, working the dream out of her tired legs.

"How'd it go?" James asked nonchalantly, and Phil could tell that he was curious, his blue eyes sparkling. He'd seen Ariadne run off then.

Eames was watching too, his eyes hooded and calm.

She looked between them. "Nothing," she said.

"Lies," James shouted. "C'mon, I tell you what Uncle Eames and I did…"

She raised an eyebrow. "Oh? And just what did you do?"

"Turned into women," James said promptly. "He's Gina. I'm Giselle."

_Oh dear God_, she thought. Eames snorted, amused. "Is there something you wanna tell me, Jimmy?" She asks, careful to keep her tone neutral and non-confrontational. "Any… _closets _you want to come out of?"

"What?" His face goes red from his neck to the roots of his hair. "Jesus, Phil, no! _God_, I'm not gay! Just because I turned into a woman _in a dream _doesn't mean anything! Look at Uncle Eames?"

Her eyebrow, if possible, went higher.

Eames cackled madly and batted his eyelashes.

"Oh _shit_," James swore. "Okay, so _he's _gay—"

"Bisexual!"

"Whatever. I'm straight, Pip, I _promise_, I'm never forging a woman again—"

"Relax, Jim," she told him, once she got her giggles under control. "I know you're pretty straight, and even if you're not, what the hell does it matter _now? _I mean, we're going to be rooting around in a guy's head, for Christ's sake."

James brightened. "Hey, Uncle Arthur," he bellowed, and in the back of the warehouse Arthur raised his head. "Is it possible to incept homosexuality into someone?"

"Probably not," Arthur shouted back, as Eames collapsed into a fit of howling laughter. "And I don't want you messing around with Jefferson's sexuality!"

Phillipa giggled again and smiled at James, who fucking _beamed. _He'd made her laugh on purpose, the little sneak.

"So what happened?" He said.

"Nothing much." The laughter was fading from her fast, sliding away like sand through fingers. "We built some stuff—well I built some stuff."

"You're Architecturally centered, then?" Eames cuts in. "Good. We just figured out that Jimmy seems to have a knack for Forgery, so we can focus on getting you two up to par."

"Yeah," she said, distracted and grateful. "When are we going to do this job?"

"Look at you, talking like an extractor already." Maniac affection crossed Eames face. "My two babies, all grown up!"

"Shut up!" James hissed. "Phil's not done yet."

"We… saw Dad." She shifted herself, kicking at the ground absentmindedly. Eames went still.

"Dom Cobb?" He said.

"Yeah," she agreed. "I know he's a projection, and he didn't shoot Aunt Ariadne this time, but he was there."

"Any idea why?" Arthur was suddenly behind her, his eyes sharp and keen and dark. She tilted her head back to meet those eyes.

"No," she said. "Not really. I guess I've been thinking about him a lot lately, what with Jefferson dragging up the past and all."

Arthur squeezed her shoulder, gently. "If you ever need anyone to talk to…"

"That's what I told her." Ariadne emerged from the bathroom, her face fierce and her eyes just a little puffy. "I think that goes for all of us." The whole group, even Saito and Yusuf, had gathered by now and they all nodded solemnly.

A rush of affection colored Phil's face and she smiled at all of them.

"I'm fine, guys, really," she promised. "It's just a dream."

Arthur cleared his throat. "Speaking of dreams," he said. "I've found something interesting."

"Oh?" Eames arches an eyebrow. "And what, pray tell, is it, darling?"

"Hold on." Arthur turned and went back to the boxes he had collected, pulling out a thick manila file and a laptop. He fired it up and, from the manila folder, pulled out an old USB drive. It was thick and chunk, not at all like the ones that were around now. "Watch," he said, and plugged it in.

The screen flickered to life, and then a picture sprang up. It was grainy and old, probably mid-2000's. It was showing a square room with a single table in it and a mirror along one wall. With her recent experience in the interrogation room, Phil recognized it as one almost instantly.

There were two people in the room. One was clearly Agent Jefferson, though he was nearly twenty years younger, clean shaven but still flinty-eyed. The other was a woman with waving hair and big, emotion-filled eyes and fine, terribly familiar features.

Phil's hands went to her own face, tracing the similarities, the cheekbones, the nose, the lips.

Mallorie Cobb's face filled the screen.

"Okay, Mrs. Cobb," Jefferson said, sitting across from her. "That camera up there's gonna record this, okay? So we can use it later. Is that alright?"

"Yes," Mal said. "Yes, that is fine."

_She had an accent_, Phil remembered with a jolt. _A French accent, not as thick as Grand-mère's, but still. _

"Okay," Jefferson said and he flipped open a notebook. "Start from the beginning; just tell me everything you told me last week. What seems to be the problem?"

"It is my husband," Mal began. "He has… _changed_, these last few months. He has been drinking, I think, and he is frightening me."

"Frightening you how?" Jefferson's tone is gentle.

Mal swallows, presses a hand to her lips. "He will say things," she said. "Terrible things, drunken things. At first I thought he did not mean them, but now…"

"What does he say?"

"He says he will kill me." Mal's voice was flat. "He says he will cut my throat and make the children watch. He says he will hurt me, hurt them."

"Has he done anything to follow through on these threats?" Jefferson's voice was colored with rage; he was angry, his hand curled tight around the pencil.

"He stares at knives, and then at me. I hide them from him, put them away, but I've seen him, running his hands over them." Mal paused here, her shoulders twitching. "Phillipa, she is afraid of him. She will not go near him. I think—I think he has been hurting her, because she is too young to know what is going on?"

"Sexually?"

"No," Mal said, a little too sharply, it seemed. "No, not like that. But _hitting_, maybe, or yelling. I do not know, I have never seen it."

"But your daughter is afraid of your husband, her father?"

"Yes," Mal said. "And I am too. I believe that he is working up the nerve to kill us, you see. That he's waiting for the right time, and then he'll strike."

Jefferson was scribbling furiously, feverishly. His expression was distorted by the bad quality, but Phil could see it, see the anxiousness coiling in his shoulders.

"I'll see if I can get you into protective custody," he said. He reached out across the table, grabbed Mal's hand. She let him. "I'll protect you," he swore. "I promise."

Mal's smile was visible even after twenty years. "I know," she said. "I trust you." She leaned across the table and kissed him on the cheek, whispered something into his ear, and then stood and left the room in a swirl of control and grace.

Jefferson watched her go, and Arthur clicked the pause button.

In the warehouse, there was silence.

"Holy shit," Ariadne spoke first. "Holy fucking _shit._"

"What was that?" Phillipa asked, her voice cracking. "What the _fuck _was that?"

James was gaping at the screen, his mouth opening and closing like he was trying to talk but couldn't.

Saito said something derogatory in rapid Japanese, his face darkening, and even Yusuf, who was always the odd man out, showed anger too.

"That's clever." There was grudging admiration in Eames' voice, the kind one conman has for another's work. "She made him _love _her. _That's _why Jefferson never let this go—he was in love with your mother."

Arthur swore and ran a hand through his hair, his eyes glittering angrily. "She did that to Dom," he hissed, lowly. "Jesus."

Ariadne was staring at the now-blank screen, her eyes narrowed.

Phillipa could barely think, and a quick look showed her that James couldn't either. _My mother used me to destroy herself, to destroy Dad. _

"That's clever," Eames was saying again. "She went to him—more times than this one, obviously, built a bond, made him fall for her. It wouldn't have been that hard, everyone was a little in love with her, even in the end when she was crazy."

"I can't believe she would do that," Arthur said darkly.

Eames laughed, harsh. "Darling, she tried to kill you once, right? Thinking you were a projection?"

The dark-haired Point Man gave an unhappy nod.

"There you go. Mal wasn't right, she thought reality was a dream. She wanted to die, to get out, and she wanted Dom with her. You said she had three psychologists declare her sane?" The last question was directed at Ariadne.

She nodded shortly. "She framed Cobb," she muttered, still staring at the blank screen.

"There it is," Eames was rubbing his hands together, pacing and pacing. Phillipa recovered enough to watch him, and there was a knife in her chest, sharp and painful and hot. _She used me. _

"There what is?" Arthur asked, a little wary.

Eames grinned broadly. "Our way in."

"Explain."

"Jefferson's carried this grudge against Cobb and his family all these years because Mala died, and he was in love with her. He's going after James because he sees Dom in him, sees the illegality, which he perceives as violence."

"He was almost _nice _to me," Phillipa said suddenly, her hand over the ache in her chest. "When he had me in interrogation. He tried to be kind, tried to appeal to me, to get me to 'stay good.'"

"Mal mentioned you," Eames said. "She linked you to her, said both of you were afraid. And you _look _like her, enough that Jefferson could be transferring some of his affection for her onto you… Oh, this _excellent._"

"Are we going to destroy this love?" James asked, finally, and his eyes were hard as flint. "Tear it apart?"

"No," Eames shook his head. "Your father believed positive emotion trumped negative every time. We need to create a positive emotion, a feeling of catharsis, that will convince Jefferson to let go of all this."

"What about 'she wanted me to move on?'" Ariadne suggested.

"Not enough. Jefferson's held this belief, this obsession, for eighteen years—the idea has to be a little more substantial."

"What about 'she could never be with me?'" Phil said suddenly. "'She still loved her husband, she only wanted to be friends.'"

Eames was nodding, slowly. "Yes," he agreed. "That could work. 'She loved her husband and she wanted me to move on,' perhaps. 'She wanted me to be happy.'"

Arthur was nodding too. "Okay," he said. "A three-level job, then. Ariadne?"

"I'm on it," the Architect said. "Phillipa and I will handle the mazes. You guys take care of the rest."

"You want me to build with you?" Shock eased the deep ache, a little. "I'm new at this."

"So was I," Ariadne assured her. "You have to learn somehow."

Arthur nodded solemnly. "Saito, can you get me a black car? New, no PIN number?"

"Certainly," the Japanese man said. "It will be here shortly."

"We'll need sedatives," Yusuf said. "I'll get started, shall I?"

"Jimmy, you're with me," Eames ordered. "I need to teach you to Forge properly."

"Okay," Arthur said, rubbing his hands together, his eyes dark and promising behind his glasses. "Let's get started."

* * *

Five

_And destitution of all property,  
Desiccation of the world of sense,  
Evacuation of the world of fancy,  
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;_

The next month was a blur. Phillipa stopped going to school altogether, abandoned her apartment, didn't leave the warehouse at all, really. She wasn't alone, though, because Saito showed up with seven cots and they all spent most of their time on them, either dreaming or actually sleeping.

She had a totem, now. Arthur had given it to her gingerly, afraid to touch it.

It was a tiny pewter top that she knew _well. _It had been her mother's totem, then her father's, and now it was tucked into a pouch against her chest, familar, a reminder of what she needed to do. Ariadne had begged her not to take it.

Phil hadn't listened, and the spun it almost constantly, checking and checking and checking.

The others were busy too.

Eames was building himself a master plan that he was saying very little about, but Phil knew it involved three levels and three different facets of the same idea; Mal loved me, but there was someone else; Mal loved her husband more; Mal wanted me to be happy, to let go. Each level of dreaming was going to focus on each idea.

The first level would be, appropriately, the hotel where Mal killed herself. Jefferson had been the first cop on the scene and his obsession started there, so it was an excellent place to reinforce the love part. Here, Eames was going to Forge Mal and he and Phillipa would go talk to Jefferson, bond, as it where.

Then they would take him upstairs and introduce the idea that Mal also loved another. Phillipa wasn't too sure about having Eames Forge her mother—the wound was raw, the memories sharper and clear than they'd ever been.

The second level would be the Cobbs' old house. Phil was even less happy about this one—Ariadne was building it all alone, because Phil wouldn't—because of what it represented. Here James would Forge their father and interact with Jefferson's projection of Mal, which would behave like she was in love with him, if it all went according to plan.

The third and final level was going to be a beach. Water symbolized, change, progress, cleanliness, and rebirth, and hopefully that would subconsciously register with Jefferson. Phillipa would meet with Jefferson there, as herself, with her aunt and uncles around her.

She'd tell Jefferson what her mother said, and that Mal wanted him to move on, to be happy and let them all go.

His projection of her should appear then, and confirm it.

In Phil's opinion, the whole plan left too much up to _should_, but according to Arthur that was the only way for Jefferson to believe he had self-generated the idea.

Phil hoped to God that it worked.

Since she couldn't do much other than build, she was building almost constantly. The first level, the hotel, was all her responsibility. Ariadne helped her make the 3-D models, of course, but it was Phil who went in, who put each and every detail into place and made sure it looked good.

She painted it, over and over again, and hung the art around the walls and stared at them, changing obsessively until it was perfect.

When she dreamed and built the hotel, her dad was always there. He watched, mostly, with his blue eyes, occasionally offering his (her own) comments, chatting idly.

She mostly ignored him, didn't look him in his cracked eyes, didn't see the brokenness that had been added as she learned what had happened.

And he had been broken, had been horribly betrayed, wounded, stung. It was little wonder he'd cracked, stayed under in a world where he could be happy.

Not that Phil forgave him. No, she didn't forgive him.

"This is very good," he'd said once, standing in the hotel lobby. The little had been gold around him, had been magnificent. He'd been in a suit that all but erased his lines, hid him, cloaked him. It was perfect for him, the shadow-man.

She had ignored him.

"Try softening the light," he'd said. "It's a bit too bright."

She hadn't answered, but she had turned the light down. It had worked, and as he melted away, he'd smiled.

"Are you ready to go?" Ariadne walked up, disturbing Phil's thoughts. She'd been staring at her paintings again, at the three models, one for each level.

She swallowed nervously. "Yeah," she said.

"Arthur just went out to get Jefferson. He'll be here in an hour."

"The somnacin has been modified," Yusuf piped up. After a month of explosions, dangerous levels of smoke, and one memorable incident where he burned a hole the sixe of a basketball in the floor, the Chemist had perfected a compound. "You'll have five hours of dreaming," he said. "That's enough for three and a half days in the first level, three months in the second, and five years in the third."

"Will we need that much?"

Yusuf shrugged. "Better safe than sorry. We'll kick out, one level at a time. It should only take a few hours, but I'd rather have too much time than not enough."

"What about limbo?" Saito asked. Old shadows flickered across his face. Phil still wasn't sure what _limbo _was, and why it was so horrible, but she did not particularly want to find out and open any more wounds, so she let it be.

"If we die under sedation, we will drop," Yusuf said flatly. "However, Jefferson's subconscious will not be militarized. Arthur made sure, this time. There is very little risk of one of us getting so badly injured that we die."

"Good," said Saito, and he rubbed a spot on his chest, almost unconsciously.

"Jimmy's ready to Forge Cobb," Eames said, ambling over. "He's not _our _Cobb, but Jefferson imagines him differently anyway, so we're good on that count. I have Mal down, I think."

"The three levels are ready to go," Ariadne said. "Phil and I taught them to Yusuf and Saito, so they'll maintain them on levels one and two."

"Very good," Eames cracked his knuckles cheerfully. "Ready for your first job, Phillipa darling?"

"I'm ready to make Jefferson go away," she said. "So I can get back to my life."

Eames nodded. "Fortunately, dreamshare has been mostly forgotten by this point, so no one is going to suspect it. The warehouse is well-protected. We're safe. Once this is over, you can go back to your life, Saito can fix Jimmy's charges, and we'll all live happily ever after."

"You're only happy if you're breaking some law," James muttered, coming to sit beside his sister, throwing a warm arm around her shoulders.

"You're one to talk," she teased, trying to sound lighthearted. "What're you gonna do for a career, Jim? You dropped out of school."

"I'm going to Japan with Uncle Saito," he said. "He's going to teach me _business._"

"You, a businessman?" Phillipa squinted at him, and she could picture it; James in an $18,000 dollar Italian suit, smiling wickedly as he made some deal with another equally dishonest businessman. "I can see that, actually."

James beamed.

"Are you going back to school?" He asked. "Back to your art major?"

"Yeah," Phil said. "If they'll take me."

"You don't want to do anything else?"

"Not really, no."

Eames tutted. "Pity, that." He leaned back in his chair. "You'd be a good psychiatrist."

"And how would you know?"

"Got my PhD in social psychology at Eton," he said cheerfully. "One psychologist knows another."

"So technically, you're _Dr. _Eames?"

"Technically." He winked cheekily, drawing a tired smile out of Phillipa.

Outside, there was a thump and then a series of knocks, _one-two-three-four-fi-five_. Everyone sat a little straighter in their chairs.

"Arthur's here," Eames said. "Places, people!"

At once, they all scrambled up to arrange themselves around the largest PASIV device they had. Mentally Phil visualized the first level of the dream, the hotel she had built with her own hands (which were shaking).

_I can do this_, she thought. _I'm ready to put this to rest. _

_Don't leave me_, a voice that sounded like her father said quietly.

Arthur came in the door, dragging the now-unconscious Special Agent Matthew Jefferson through after him. He dropped the man to bolt the door and then continued, heaving him up and into an open lawn chair.

"Everyone ready?" He asked, his glassed eyes glittering.

All six of them nodded, one after the other.

"Excellent," Arthur said, and he passed out the needles, the long threads shimmering. Phil slipped hers under her skin in a now-familiar motion, wincing a little as it settled, cool, against her skin.

"Pleasant dreams," the Point Man said, sticking a needle in his own arm, and then the world went dark.

_This is the one way, and the other  
Is the same, not in movement  
But abstention from movement; while the world moves  
In appetency, on its metalled ways  
Of time past and time future._


	4. part iv

**Inception Big_Bang. **

**Dedicated to paintedsongs, iheartfluffy, Molly, Crystal, Jim, and Sam. **

**Disclaimer: I do not own Inception or _Burnt Norton. _**

* * *

Part IV

_Time and the bell have buried the day,  
The black cloud carries the sun away._

* * *

One

_Will the sunflower turn to us_

Phillipa opens her eyes. Soft jazz music rolls over her and she's got a martini in one hand and a young man on the other, smiling widely at her.

"Wanna dance?" He asks, and he's pretty cute, he's got dimples and wide, honest eyes, but she's here to get rid of Jefferson, not dance.

"Maybe later," she says with what she hopes to be a flirtatious smile. "I think I see my dad; I'm not supposed to be here."

The projection sighs sadly. "Okay," he says heavily. "I'll be back for you later, though, if your dad doesn't ground you first."

"Looking forward to it."

The projection laughs and wanders away.

"Very smooth." Arthur appears beside Phillipa, the cut of his suit slim and dangerous-looking. "He was very disappointed."

She made a face. "If the projection was attracted to me, doesn't that mean Jefferson is too, subconsciously?"

Arthur tilts his head. "Well, in light of what we learned about his obsession with your mother…"

"Ew." She groans and smacks Arthur lightly. "Don't even say that. That's disgusting. He's twice my age and he wants to put my baby brother in prison."

Arthur chuckles and takes her arm. "Come on," he says. "Eames should be in the lobby by now with James." He grabs her hand and pulls her through the crowded ballroom, putting on his best "angry father" face.

"I can't be_lieve_ you would sneak out like this!" He says, loudly. "I trusted you!"

"I'm not a little kid anymore, _Dad! _You can 't run my life like I'm five! I'm nineteen, for God's sake."

"If you live under my house, you live under _my _rules!"

The projections turn away, go back to dancing. Their ruse has worked, and, pulling away from the crowd, Phil has time to survey her handiwork. The hotel is swanky, like it was eighteen years ago, gold-lit and soft, filled with ridiculously expensive furniture and extremely well-dressed projections.

Her own sleek blue dress feels odd, heavy on her shoulders, but at the same time liberating, because she feels beautiful and powerful and no one can ever take that away from her here.

James is standing alone in the middle of the lobby, wearing a suit that makes him look older and younger at the same time. He grins widely when he sees them.

"Where's Eames?" Arthur asks

"With Uncle Saito. They're getting Aunt Ariadne. They should be here soon."

"Alright," Arthur nods. "Jefferson should be in the bar. Jim, you and I will rattle him up, act as antagonists, memories of the past. Then Eames and you, Pippa, will go in and chase us away, "saving" him."

"Then we'll start planting the idea," Phil recites dutifully. "That Mom really did love him."

"Good girl," Arthur says. "Ariadne, Saito, and Yusuf will run interference. After a bit, you leave and go to room 3002. I'll be up there with James. Eames will follow with Jefferson, hinting that there is someone else."

"We'll go down another level," James says. "And Uncle Yusuf'll stay behind?"

"Yeah, he'll hold the dream and keep the projections off of us. On the second level, we'll be in your house, so try not to get lost in memory, alright? Use your totems." Phil curled her fingers around the ring she was wearing as a necklace. "We'll shift his thoughts to 'Mal loved Dom' there."

"Okay," Phil says agreeably.

There's a _ding, _announcing the arrival of the elevator, and Saito and the rest step out, glamourous and deadly in their fine clothes.

Phillipa's heart stutters in her chest because there's her mom, there's Mal, gliding rather than walking along the lobby, her hair perfect, her shoulders proud, her face beautiful and fierce.

_It's only Eames,_ she thought. _Just Eames. _

"C'mon, Jim." Arthur beckoned with his hand and the two disappeared to the bar, determined to rile up Jefferson.

"You look surprised," Eames-Mal says, in Mal's French lilt. "Is it too much for you, darling?"

The 'darling' makes her relax, because she never remembers her mother saying it—it's something only Eames says.

"No," she replies, after she can speak again. She can't stop looking at the face of her mom. "I'm okay."

"Good," Eames says. "Too much is riding on this for you not to be."

She glares at him, because that is a very Eames thing to say. Ariadne squeezes her shoulder once, comforting.

"You did a great job with this," she says kindly, gesturing around at the hotel. "It's exactly like I imagined it."

Phil smiles. "Thanks."

There's a loud sound from the bar.

"That's our cue, Pippa," Eames-Mal says. She takes a deep, shuddering breath.

"Okay."

"Good luck," Ariadne calls, and Yusuf waves and Saito dips his head regally.

She smiles nervously and walks beside Eames, hyperaware of every movement, every little detail that made up her mother.

"You'll be fine," he says in his own voice, and he gives her fingers a light squeeze. "Here we go."

The bar is smoky and dim, upper-class, and Jefferson is sitting at the bar in a suit and glaring viciously at Arthur and James.

"Mr. Charles," he's snarling, and Eames snorts softly under his breath. "Take you trash client and get out."

"No," says Arthur, black and cold. James grins widely, snatches up Jefferson's drink and takes a swig.

Fury covers his face and his moustache twitches. "Now listen here," he growls, and Eames-Mal steps in.

"Who are you?" He demands, his accent French and heavy and angry. He wraps one of Mal's slender hands around Jefferson's arm. "How dare you upset my date, hm? I will have your balls on a platter, _chérie, _I will have your license revoked!"

Arthur glares and James grumbles, tosses the now-empty drink aside. "What're you gonna do about it?" He says, almost lazily.

Mal-Eames smiles sharply. "Security!" He calls, and at once two large walking meat slabs are there, dragging Arthur and James away.

"Mallorie," Jefferson breathes, and he reaches out to touch the smooth skin. "Mallorie."

"Matthew," Eames says, and he runs Mal's fingers down Jefferson's face. "Matty. I thought I'd find you here, _amore._"

"What are you doing?" Jefferson asks, and he can't seem to look away.

Eames laughs a woman's coy laugh, throaty and rich. "Oh, _chérie, _what do you think I'm doing?"

Jefferson swallows compulsively.

"And look who I brought along." Eames sweeps Mal's arm in Phil's direction, and nervously she steps forward.

Jefferson frowns, squints.

"You don't remember me?" She asks.

"No," he says, "I do, I think… You're Phillipa? Phillipa Cobb?"

She smiles at him, goes to stand beside Eames-Mal. "Hello," she says.

"What are you doing here?"

"I wanted to say thank you," she says, sounding sincere. "You care about me. No one's really ever done that before."

Jefferson, to her delight and surprise, seems to blush a little bit. "You're a remarkable young woman," he murmurs. "So much like your mother."

Eames gives another coy laugh. "She is, isn't she?" He marches his fingers up Jefferson's arm and the agent visibly shudders. Eames is smiling now, the expression devastating on Mal's face.

"Matty," he says. "It's been a long time."

"It has," Jefferson agrees.

Eames-Mal smiles gently. "You've missed me?"

"I'll always miss you."

"I miss you too," Eames says, lowly, softly. "We both did."

Phil nods helpfully.

"You're a good person to us," Eames continues. "You helped us so much."

Jefferson finally looks away, chewing at his lip. "I wanted to marry you," he blurts. "I wanted to be with you. And you, Phillipa, I wanted to be your father because your own was terrible."

Phil smiles but it has an edge that she can't seem to remove. "You would have been good to me," she says instead. "I needed a father."

"I know."

Eames-Mal flashes Phillipa a look; Jefferson is lost in the past, his eyes swimming.

"I would have loved you," she says, a little urgently, and Jefferson's head turns so fast she thinks he might have whiplash. "I know it."

A knot seems to form in the agent's throat.

_Now_, Eames' face says. Phillipa lets her face go sad, go far away. "I'm coming," she says, to no one, and then she walks away, feeling Jefferson's eyes burn on her neck the whole way.

Once she's out of sight, Yusuf is at her elbow.

"An admirable performance," he says approvingly. "You really had him going—I think we're going to get the first part of the plan in place without too much difficulty."

"That was hard," she says.

Yusuf chuckles. "It usually is. Come on, we need to get you upstairs."

He leads her through the crowd, the projections bumping into them lightly.

"Are they starting to suspect?" She whispers in his ear.

"Yes," Yusuf says. "Since they're not militarized it will take them a while to respond, fortunately." He ushers her into the elevator and together they go up to floor 30, the thirtieth story. They're set up in room 3002.

"Did it work?" Ariadne asks without preamble. Arthur has another PASIV out and ready to go. James is pacing now, because it's his turn next, his turn to get the inception going.

"I think so," she says.

"Good."

"The projections are starting to act a little nervous," Yusuf warns. "Eames better get up here soon."

"Give him time to work," Arthur ordered. "His art is a delicate one, which is ironic, since he's the most crass, loud person I've ever met."

"But you love him," Ariadne teases, and Arthur rolls his eyes.

"Next level, the Cobb house," he says.

Outside the room, Phil hears voices. One is her mother's—Eames—and the other is Jefferson, and they're drawing closer. Arthur makes a motion with his hands and they all scatter, move to the deep shadows (she designed this room with hiding in mind) and there's a click and the door swings open, and Eames and Jefferson stumble in, tangled in one antoher.

It's actually kind of sickening. Jefferson is _kissing her mother_—Eames, but still—and it's disgusting, because she doesn't remember much about her mom, but she knew that Mal loved Dom, loved him so much that it killed her, killed them.

Arthur twitches in the shadows. Apparently, he's territorial.

"I love you," Eames-Mal says, breathlessly. "I love you."

"Stay," Jefferson says, groans. "Tonight, stay with me."

Something like regret flashes across Mal's face. "I can't," Eames whispers. "Matty, I can't, I have to go."

"What? Why?"

Eames chews his lip. "There's someone else I love," he murmurs. "Someone I cannot bear to leave."

"Who?" Jefferson asks, and there's agony in his voice. "Who is it, Mallorie?"

Eames smiles with Mal's face, a sad, broken thing. "I am sorry," he says, and then he hits Jefferson square in the nose.

The agent crumples and Arthur is there to catch him, to cushion him and slide a needle into his skin. "Okay," he says.

Eames drops Mal, her skin falling from him easily.

"It worked," he announces proudly. "He believed me, believed that I was Mal. Now it's your turn, Jimmy. His subconscious should feed what I just planted—just go with it, alright?"

James nods, pale but determined.

"Gather 'round," Arthur says, and they all do, everyone except Yusuf, slipping needles into their skin. It still itches in a dream.

"Ready?" Yusuf asks, and there's a chorus of 'yeses.'

"Good luck," the Chemist says, and the hotel starts to blur, fade to black.

And then for a second, just a heartbeat, Phillipa sees her father's blue eyes peering into her own. She gasps, and then she's gone.

* * *

Two

_will the clematis  
Stray down, bend to us_

She doesn't want to open her eyes. She knows what she'll see if she does—wooden floors, high windows, pictures marching down the wall, light dotting the warm wood. She'll follow the hall into the kitchen, and sunlight will stream from the glass door and fall on the empty table, make the knife on the counter glitter.

Jefferson will be standing in the center, looking around, confused maybe, or remembering.

She doesn't want to see.

But she has too, to make all of this go away, forever. She wraps her fingers around the top tucked into her dress, and the cool pewter is reassuring.

She opens her eyes, and then screws them shut again, hissing as the light, sharp like knives, stabs into her eyes.

It's harsh and bright and too much, but it starts to fade, to soften and edge away. When she can open her eyes again without hissing in pain, she does, and she blinks rapidly.

Her house looks the same. Same wood, same pictures, same high windows letting light fall onto the floor in familiar patterns. When she was kid, she used to jump from light puddle to light puddle, pretending the wood was hot lava and the light was cold rock, saving her life.

As she looks, though, she starts to notice little differences. The wood is a shade too dark and the boards are going the wrong way. The pictures are blurred, smudged, and the light from the windows is too bright, the wrong shade for the room.

This isn't her house. It's close, it could almost be, but there are the tiny little differences, and she can live with them, for now. She can pretend that this isn't the house she grew up in.

Taking a deep breath, she starts to walk down the hall, her heels clicking. She's still wearing her hotel dress and it clings to her skin, blue like deep water.

She steps, one foot after the other, down the hall and then she's standing in the kitchen and the table's empty and the knife is lying on the counter, unassuming, sharp, dangerous.

Agent Jefferson is waiting for her, and he's looking out the window and his eyes are dark and a little lost. Phil wonders how much of the hotel he remembers. She breathes again and gathers herself, her fingers brushing the cool little top.

"Uncle Matt!" She says, and Jefferson turns and she smiles at him. "You're back!"

"Uncle…?" He's confused, his head canted to the side and his eyes wary.

"You're a few days early," Phillipa continues, and she goes to him and gives him a hug. He's tense under her arms.

"Where was I?" He murmurs, his mouth opening and closing, his moustache twitching slightly.

"Mm, Vegas, I think. You were there for a conference." The lie is practiced—she delivers it perfectly, flawlessly. Eames would be proud. He's outside somewhere, in the grass, circling, watching, waiting if anything goes wrong.

Jefferson's hands are almost tentative, hopeful on her back.

"I missed you, Uncle Matt," she says, and her mouth tastes like bitter salt and seawater. "Mom did too."

"Your mother?"

She rolls her eyes, comically. "Yeah, Uncle Matt, my mom. You've only been with us for eighteen years."

"Can you, can you call her for me?" There's something undeniably like hope in Jefferson's face, and it almost hurts to look.

"Sure," she says instead, smiling a big, toothy grin that feels odd on her face. She turns her head down the hall.

"Mom! Uncle Matt's here!"

For a second, nothing happens, and then there's the unmistakable sound of feet on stairs and heels down the hall, _click click click, _and Jefferson can't seem to breathe.

Mal steps into the kitchen and smiles, spreading her arms and walking right to Jefferson. "Matty, _mon amour_," she says warmly, and folds him into her arms. "Matty, you're home early!"

"Yeah," he says weakly. "Skipped the last few days of the conference—routine, rookie stuff."

Mal laughs, tinkling. She's wearing a white summer dress that seems to move on its own, graceful, flowing. It's kind of enviable, really.

But this Mal isn't real, isn't a Forge or herself. There's an air about her, something off that doesn't quite fit with what Phil knows about her.

This Mal is flawless, perfect. Her eyes are a little too liquid and her skin is glowing, her hair falling gently down her shoulders. And she smiles too much, showing too much teeth. Her real mother never smiled like this.

This Mal is a shade.

"I am glad you're home," Mal says, kissing Jefferson on the cheek. His eyes crinkle happily. It'd be sweet if it wasn't so warped.

"Yeah," Jefferson agrees. "It's good to be home."

Outside, Phil catches a flash of movement. Eames is there, pacing, half-hidden under the shadow of a tree.

"The conference was good, then?" Mal asks, and Phillipa thinks she should be holding a knife.

"Little boring. Like I said, routine stuff."

Mal laughs again. "I missed you, _amour_," she tells him. "It's been a whole week."

"I know," he says, even though he really doesn't. "I know. It feels like longer."

Mal smiles, kisses him again. "Matty, I'd ask you to stay for dinner," she says. "But since you came early, I already have plans."

"Plans?"

She nods and Phil steps in to take over. "You know the rules, Uncle Matt. He's okay with you and Mom, but today is his day with us. He should be home soon."

"Who?" A sharp, almost frantic edge floods into the agent's face. "Who's coming?"

Mal smiles fondly. "Dom, _amour._"

"Dom _Cobb?_"

The projection laughs softly. "Yes, _chérie_, Dom Cobb, the man who is my husband."

"Your husband?"

"Only for the last twenty-five years," Phil joins in, giggling. "I mean, I know you don't like him, Uncle Matt, but I thought the two of you had worked this out."

"_This_?"

"This, _amour_," Mal agrees, taking one of his hands. "Come now, it's been years. Can't you put your silly feud to rest? I love you," she says. "I really do, Matty, but I love him too. He's my _husband_."

"He'll hurt you," says Jefferson, frustration dark on his face. "He'll kill you."

Mal laughs again. "Dom? He couldn't hurt a fly. And he loves me. He's not going to hurt me." She kisses Jefferson's cheek, pats him on the shoulder, and then without looking back she walks to the glass door and pushes it aside, stepping into the yard.

"Wait," Jefferson groans, and he reaches after her, trying to catch her, hold her.

Down the hall, there's a noise like a door opening, and then footsteps, heavier than Mal's, than her own. It's James' turn now.

James walks into the kitchen wearing his father's face, his father's skin, and Jefferson turns and bares his teeth.

"Jefferson," James says coolly. His face is a perfect copy of his father's.

"Cobb," the agent snarls, and his hands and moustache are twitching. "Why are you here?"

James squints. "This is my house," he says, like one who is talking to a particularly stupid dog. "I _live _here."

"You shouldn't be here!" Jefferson's voice is rising in pitch. "You shouldn't be here, why are you here? Leave leave you need to _leave_."

"No," says James. "This is my home. My family. I love them."

Something dark twists onto the man's face. "If you won't leave," Jefferson says, low and dark. "Then I'll make you." In one fluid motion he draws a gun and levels it, aiming it at James' chest.

It's too tight to breathe all of a sudden.

_James_, thinks Phillipa, and she moves instinctively, leaping in front of him, her arms thrown wide.

Jefferson's eyes go wide and behind him, in the yard, Arthur and Eames slip from the cover of the trees, advancing on Jefferson with guns drawn.

"Please," Phil gasps, because if Jefferson shoots he'll kill James, he'll drop him into limbo and she can't lose anyone else, not now. "Please, he's my dad." _My brother, my baby brother, I need him, I can't lose him, please don't shoot him, please._

"You're afraid of him," Jefferson says unsteadily. "He'll hurt you."

"No," Phil pleads. "No, he's not going to hurt me. He's my dad, please don't kill him."

"Put the gun down, Jefferson," James says lowly, his face set and serious. "C'mon, put it down. It's okay. I'm not going to hurt them, alright? They're my family. I could never hurt them."

Confusion and anger and grief is flashing across the agent's face, faster than Phil can track. "You…" He starts, but he stops because he's confused, he doesn't know what's happening.

"Please," Phil says, slowly. "I love him."

"You love him." And something's breaking in Jefferson's face. The gun is shaking, lowering, and Arthur and Eames are almost to the open sliding glass door. "You've always loved him."

And Phillipa knows that he's not talking to her, not really, she just happens to be there and convenient and close.

She nods, and Jefferson closes his eyes, his gun clattering to the floor.

Arthur's there, an arm wrapping around the agent's neck. He goes down without a sound, pooling on the wooden floor at Arthur's feet.

"Are you two okay?" Arthur says, concerned. Eames comes in and goes to James, grabbing his too-broad shoulders.

"Shake it off, Jimmy," he's saying. "Come back to me."

James closes his eyes and Dom Cobb falls away from him, peels off like an extra layer of skin. Her baby brother is shaking and trembling, suddenly too small for himself.

"That was good work," Ariadne says, and she grabs Phil into a tight hug. "That was good fucking work."

"Thanks," Philli[a mutters. Her voice sounds like sandpaper.

Arthur is there too, a warm, steady presence. He presses his hand into hers.

"You did a good job," he says lowly. "You just saved your brother's life."

She smiles up at him tiredly.

"Are we ready?" Says Saito.

Arthur looks at all of them.

"Yeah," Phillipa replies, and James nods a little roughly.

"Okay," says Arthur. "Let's go."

The PASIV in his hands had plenty of needles, and everyone slides one in. Phillipa resists the urge to scratch at it.

Saito doesn't have a needle, because he's going to stay behind. He rests his fingers on the device. "Ready?" He asks, and they all nod.

"I will see you when we kick out," he says, and presses the button.

The world goes gray around the edges and Phillipa lets go, and she falls.

* * *

Three

_tendril and spray  
Clutch and cling?_

The sound of the ocean brings her back. Water splatters on her face, cool and saltly, and her eyes flicker open and she stirs enough to realize that she's on a beach, the ocean lapping lazily a few feet away.

Sand sticks to her skin and she's damp like she's just come in from a swim, and she stands up, brushing the sand away, and looks around.

She's standing on a beach and farther down projections mill nervously, anxiously.

They look twitchy.

The ocean slurps and hums nearby, sedate, calming, just like she and Ariadne planned. It's supposed to soothe Jefferson, to calm him down.

Phil hopes that it works.

She can see her family, walking with the projections, trying to lure their attention away, to keep them occupied, just like they planned. She smiles when she sees them, familiar shapes, and she knows, right then and there, that she loves them all.

"You always did, Pip." Dom Cobb is standing beside his daughter, his feet in the water. She doesn't look at him.

"Did I?" She asks, a bit rhetorically.

He chuckles. "Sure," he says. "You just didn't want to admit it. You didn't want to connect yourself to them, to make yourself vulnerable."

"And now?" She raises an eyebrow.

"Now you know better," he says simply. He smells like the ocean. "Jefferson's down there. Don't you want to finish this?"

She grits her teeth and reluctantly starts walking beside the water. She's wearing a white dress and her feet are bare, leaving footprints behind in the sand.

The waves rush and suck them away, leaving the sand new and clean behind her. Dom Cobb walks in the ocean and he leaves no footprints, like he isn't even there at all.

As she gets closer, she notices little things, like how riled the projections are and how dark the sky is. Jefferson is angry, then. The last dream has shaken him up, upset him, and this dream is reflecting it, has gone dark and dangerous with it.

James is chatting up a group of female projections, smiling, eyes bright and cunning. They're watching him and they're calmer than the others—whatever he's doing is working.

Ariadne has her own projections and she's got them mostly quiet, their eyes fixed attentively on her.

Arthur and Eames don't seem to care about the projections watching them. Their hands are all over each other, flickering, and they're kissing the deep kisses of people who might never see each other again.

Phillipa smiles at them, a little sadly. _I knew they were screwing. _

She kept walking, and there were projections circling, pacing, in front of a cliff. She knows that Jefferson will be in the middle of them.

"I'm here," says her father, quietly. "They won't hurt you."

She smiles a bit. "Will you hurt them?"

"I don't know. Will I?"

Phillipa takes a deep breath and walks right through the circling, anxious projections, and she can feel her dad right behind her.

Jefferson is kneeling in the sand, his fingers curled into it, head down. His shoulders are shaking.

"Uncle Matt," she calls, and she stops a few feet away from him. He doesn't move, but there's a hitch in his ragged breath that lets her know he's listening. "Uncle Matt."

"What?" He says, and he's hollow and raspy. He tugs at the sand, watching it slip through his fingers, and she thinks maybe he's trying to catch it and hold it and never let it go.

"Mom wanted me to tell you something," she murmurs. She doesn't want to get any closer.

Jefferson smiles, harsh and bitter, and his moustache doesn't look so silly now. "And where is your mother? Off with _Cobb_?"

"No," Phillipa says. "Mom's dead."

The agent seems to stop breathing.

"I told her," he mutters. "I told her Cobb was trouble, that he'd kill her."

"Dad didn't kill Mom," she tells him. "Mom killed herself, Uncle Matt. Mom jumped out of a building."

"No!" Jefferson shakes his head, a quick, abortive motion. "No, he killed her, I know he did!"

She does get closer then, because she doesn't know what else to do. "No," Phillipa says, tenderly as she can managed. She rests a small hand on his shoulder timidly, and Jefferson doesn't move.

"No," he says weakly.

"Yes," Phil disagrees. "She killed herself."

"She left me." There's a plaintive note and Phil hurts for him. She wishes this was easy.

"Mom," she says carefully. "Left me too. But she didn't do it to hurt you, okay? She didn't want to hurt us. She was sick. She was confused. She wanted to go _home_." And that's what Mal wanted all along, isn't it, the chance to go home, to be with the people she loved again, to be _real_ again, even though she was real and her world was only a dream.

"She loved you," she continues, determined to make the inception stick, to make the dream end and to just go away, to leave all of it behind, forgotten. "She wanted to thank you, for taking care of her, of us, for so long."

Jefferson doesn't look at her. "She didn't say goodbye," he says.

"Because she wanted you to move on." And this is it, the final part of the plan. This could end it. "She wanted you to be happy, Uncle Matt."

"Happy?"

"She wanted you to love someone else, someone who wou;dn't hurt you," Phil presses on. "She wanted you to be happy."

Jefferson makes a sound somewhere between a laugh and a cry. "You don't know that," he says. "You can't possibly know that."

"I do," Phil insists. "And I can prove it."

"How?"

She smiles at him, gently. Behind her Dom is tense. "Look," she says, and she takes his bigger hands, pulls them up out of the sand. The grains float away into the air, and underneath them is a pewter top, sitting half-buried in the white sand.

Jefferson, with fingers that shake, reaches for it, cradles it in his hands. "Oh," he says. "Oh."

"You know what it is?"

"It's Mal's top," he says, and there's something that might be hope in his eyes. "She would spin it all the time, just spin and spin and spin." He's got tears in his dark eyes and Phil aches and also feels better.

"She wants me to be happy," Jefferson says.

"Yeah," Phil nods, and she's relieved because this means it's _working_, the inception. Jefferson is believing what they want him to believe. "Just let it all go and be happy, somewhere."

"I think I'll do that," Jefferson is nodding his head. "I think I can be happy."

"Good," Phil says.

"What about you?" He asks, and the top is clutched tight in his fingers. "Will you try and be happy?"

She looks at him, long and hard. "What makes you think I'm not happy?"

Jefferson gives her a ghost of a smile. "You've got your own shadows," he says, and his eyes are on the blue-eyed man behind her.

_Dad_, she thinks, and sighs. "I promise that I'll try and be happy if you will."

"Deal," says Jefferson, and he's happy and sad all at once. The top is clutched to his chest tightly, and he's closing his eyes.

"Time to go," Dom Cobb murmurs, and Phillipa stands stiffly, giving one last look at Jefferson, who's crying a bit, before following her father into the crowd.

The sky is lightening, now, the sun breaking free of the dark clouds. The projections have settled down and are now wandering along the beach, letting the quiet waves hum and lap at their feet, swallowing their footprints.

Ariadne and James are already waiting, at the top of the cliff. They put it there to have enough height to kick out, and it's almost time, Phil thinks.

Her father continues at her side, steady, smelling like salt and seawater.

"He was talking about you, wasn't he?" Phil asks him. He smiles.

"Yeah, I think he was," Dom Cobb says.

She closes her eyes, briefly. "You're not going to leave me, are you? You're not going to let this rest. You won't disappear."

"No," says the projection flatly. "No, I'm not."

"Okay," Phil says, and she knows what she has to do now, to make her father and the past sleep. She makes her way up the bluff and her dad is a steady presence at her side. When she gets to the top, Ariadne and James see Dom and their eyes go almost comically wide and they gape like fish.

"Cobb," Ariadne breathes, and memory is flashing in front of her eyes.

"Dad," says James, just as soft, and he's drinking in the sight of Dom like he'll never get enough.

Dom Cobb smiles, steady at Phillipa's side. "Ariadne," he says, warmly. "Jimmy."

Phillipa keeps walking, getting closer and closer to them. Behind her, she hears Arthur and Eames clamoring up the bluff, trying to get to her, get to her quickly.

She knows what she needs to do.

"Why are you here?" Ariadne asks, and the projection smiles crookedly, walking with Phil all the way towards the edge of the cliff.

"She needs me," he says, and Phil almost smiles because he sounds like a normal, devoted father when he says that.

"You're not real," James murmurs, still wide-eyed and hungry. "You're a projection."

They're so focused on Dom that they don't see Phil go all the way to the edge, her bare toes sticking out onto empty air.

Behind her Arthur shouts. "Pippa! Wait!"

She closes her eyes and sways, ready to topple like the top in her pocket, in Jefferson's hands.

"Pippa, not yet!"

Dom stares at Arthur. "Sorry," Phil hears him say. "She has to go now."

And he shoves, not hard but enough, and she topples off the cliff, falling, falling, falling, and as she goes, she goes up.

She gasps and tears at her arms, dragging the needle from her skin, and Saito is there, murmuring to her, worried, concerned.

"Phillipa," he says, in his deep voice. "Relax, you are safe."

"Sorry," she breathes. "I fell."

"You are early," Saito says. "Are you alright? Did the inception work?"

"I'm fine," she tells him, standing up, shaking. Her mouth tastes like salt and seawater. "I'm okay, and yeah, I think it did."

She looks down at Jefferson's sleeping face.

He doesn't look so sad right now, not like he did a level down.

Saito is saying something, sounding pleased, but she's not listening because she has to go, the others will be waking up soon.

She lurches down the hallway, past the sun spots and the windows and the blurry pictures and climbs the steps. Saito follows her, saying something else, sounding concerned this time. He's at the bottom of the stairs and looking up, and she smiles.

"Goodbye," she tells him, and she jumps, tumbling downdowndown the stairs, and his shout is lost as she rushes up.

She scares Yusuf. She's early and she knows it, and she blinks and opens her eyes to the hotel room that she built, all yellow light and burning familiarty. Yusuf is crouched over Arthur's body, checking something, muttering to himself, and he jumps when she sits up and pulls the needle from her arm, gasping.

"You're early," he says, and comes over to her, taking her needle with gentle fingers. "Are you okay?"

She nods, breathless. "Inception worked," she says, and on shaky feet she stands. "I fell—came up early."

Yusuf nods gently and helps her up. "Just sit tight then," he says. "We have maybe thirty minutes before the kick is scheduled to occur."

She nods and doesn't listen, making for the window instead.

She gets a foot up before Yusuf notices. "Hey," he shouts. "What are you doing? Are you trying to kill yourself?"

_Yes,_ she thinks, and gets all the way out the window, balanced on the ledge. She closes her eyes and lets go.

She drops, way too fast, and the wind makes her screw up her eyes and for a moment, just a second, she sees her mother in a black dress that billows behind her like wings, and Mal smiles and touches her daughter's face.

"I'm proud of you, _chérie_," she whispers, and Phillipa closes her eyes.

She never hits the ground.

* * *

Four

_Chill  
Fingers of yew be curled  
Down on us?_

She woke with a shuddering, heaving gasp. The warehouse was quiet except for the slow, even breathing of everyone around her, and jerkily Phil pulled the needle from her arm and tried to stand, shaking the dream out of her legs.

She fumbled in her pocket for the top and found its smooth weight, and when she spun it, it toppled neatly, confirming her reality.

She breathed a sigh of relief.

_I made it out,_ she thought. There was a strange sense of pride in her belly, warm, comfortable. Jefferson was tied to his chair, his face still, peaceful. Ariadne and Arthur and Eames were also still and calm, relaxed, and James had a vague grin on his face.

He was happy.

_I'll be back, _she promised them, silently. _I just have something to do first. Making Jefferson stop isn't enough for me. I need to put the past to rest, once and for all. _

They didn't answer or suddenly come kicking back to reality, but Phil knew she didn't have much time.

Smiling grimly, Phil grabbed her pea coat and rushed out the door, setting her face, feeling memory and shadow stalking at her footsteps, driving her on.

She wound her way through the maze of warehouses, seeking the glare of civilization, and the sun was high in the sky, only noon. Soon she found the blessed streets of a city and still no one was following her. By now they'd be awake, but they'd be confused, not sure where she went.

They would check her art studio and her apartment first, and then they would piece together where she had gone. She needed to move.

She called a taxi, because the clinic was too far away to bike and she didn't have a car.

No one followed.

Pleased with herself, Phil told the cabbie where she wanted to go and fell silent, resting her forehead against the cool glass. The city faded rapidly, buildings turning into trees made of fire.

The clinic was a good distance from the city, in a secluded forest in the Santa Cruz mountains. It was very peaceful and serene, so that patients could recover in solitude and comfort. And privacy. Privacy was the most important.

Phil still hated it. She hated going there, looking down at what had once been her father, and trying desperately to remember what he had been like _before_, if he had been happy, strong, a good father.

But if she could finally put all this to rest, bury it forever, she'd do it.

It wasn't like her father was going to do anything but lie there anyway.

_It's ridiculous to be afraid of a shadow_, she told herself sternly. _He's nothing but a memory now. _Even though he'd been more in her dreams, had been there, warm and steady and smelling like salt and seawater.

The cabbie kept shooting her strange glances—she guessed that he wasn't used to girls her age being so quiet and withdrawn. Phillipa prided herself on being reserved and composed, but most others seemed to find it a little odd.

But they left her alone, and that was okay.

The rest of the ride passed uneventfully. The trees were a steady line of golden fire on either side and the undercover car followed, it's dull hood the same color as the slate sky. It was rather anticlimactic, not that she expected a car chase or anything, but still, Arthur was out there somewhere with James, and the pair of them were notorious for their stubbornness and their reluctance to let anything go.

But they weren't following, yet, at least.

Soon the cab pulled in front of the wrought iron gates, the name _Blue Arbors _formed in cold black metal above her head. Beyond the gate, the clinic was more like a mansion than anything. It was stately, brick, and nestled in a wide clearing, the sweeping grasses on either side swaying in the crisp wind.

She saw the white of orderlies, tending to patients who were enjoying the cool fall day, and the colors of people, buddle in their jackets against the mild chill.

"Name," a voice crackled over the intercom.

"Phillipa Cobb."

"One moment please," the cool voice said, and Phillipa waited, staring at the brick building, her eyes sharp and calculating.

Uncle Saito was the reason her father was in the clinic in the first place. It was an expensive institution—roughly two million dollars a year, give or take. But Saito was Saito—he purchased airlines on a regular basis, so obviously this was like pocket change to him.

"Welcome back, Miss Cobb," the voice said, and the iron gates buzzed, swinging inward. One of the many security guards approached her, nodding politely.

"Ma'm," he said.

Phil resisted the urge to roll her eyes. What was she, old? "Hello."

"Who are you here to visit?" The guard asked. She could tell he was doing it to be polite. Every time she came here, the guards asked the same thing as they escorted her from the gate to the clinic itself.

"My dad," she said shortly, and he got the hint, nodding and falling silent.

One good thing about Blue Arbors was that the personnel understood when and when not to push. They didn't pry unnecessarily or stick their noses in too far—they asked the basics and then let it go.

It was a trait Phillipa wished the rest of the human race shared.

The gravel crunched under her feet and within a few minutes she was inside the grand building, her shoes clacking on marble floors, the ceiling vaulting above her.

In her opinion, it was a little much, the décor, but hey, whatever the doctors wanted. It felt like she had stepped into a rich man's home, not a hospital. The guard took her all the way to the front desk, nodded again, and left Phil alone with the receptionist.

"Miss Cobb," the receptionist smiled, and then Phillipa went through all the security checks. She presented I.D., signed some waivers, jammed her thumb into a scanner.

Once the system was satisfied that Phillipa was who she said she was, the receptionist smiled again. "Third floor, room 307," she said.

Phil nodded. It was always 307.

The clinic was a nice place. It was clean and bright and didn't stink like antiseptic, but then no surgeries were preformed here. It was strictly for people suffering from or recovering from head and spinal injuries. There was a pool and a fitness room and therapists of every kind helping patients, some of whom could walk while others lolled in wheelchairs, vacant-eyed and drooling.

The bottom floor was for the recovering patients. The farther up one went, the more severe the condition of the patients. Dominick Cobb was on the second-highest floor, the top one being reserved for the newest arrivals, because he had been in a persistent, unbroken coma for fourteen years.

He didn't need life support, oddly enough—his body kept going by itself just fine, and he breathed on his own and his heart beat strongly in his chest, but he just wasn't _there_.

He was gone, and as Phillipa walked into his room, she smiled, sort of bitterly.

"Hi, Dad."

Dominick Cobb was a shell of his former self. Phillipa had seen pictures—as a younger man, her father had been tall and broad-shouldered, all clean lines and easy grace. He carried himself proudly, his eyes intelligent even in pictures, and he smiled and had an arm thrown around his wife's shoulders like it was the most natural thing in the world.

But now he was shrunken, his face creased heavily with age even though he'd missed the aging part. His eyes were closed but Phil knew that they had gone slightly foggy with disuse and age—one doctor commented that Dom Cobb probably would have gone blind, later in life. His hair was the color of the clouded sky, cut short by hospital regulations, and he was clean-shaven, the lines on his face even more prominent, casting deep shadows.

Fourteen years of stillness had left his muscles shriveled, useless, and he'd lost a considerable amount of weight. An IV fed him and monitors beeped steadily, unchanging.

(Always unchanging.)

He was cool to the touch. Blood moved slowly through Dom Cobb because it wasn't really needed anymore, and Phillipa gently touched his face, her fingers mapping out the lines.

"Hi, Dad."

He didn't respond, but she was so far beyond hoping that it didn't even register.

She hated coming to Blue Arbors.

It was hard to look at him. She didn't remember much of her father—she'd been six when he left, and James only three, and eight when he came back in a coma—except snippets, brief little flashes of laughter or dancing or warm eyes, hands showing her how to ride a bike or arms cradling her after a nightmare, or picking her up and taking her away while Mal screamed in the next room.

And this was the man who effectively ruined her childhood, who made James into a fucking bank robber, who left his two children alone and mostly defenseless, without a father to guide them.

Phil had no doubts that if her dad had been around, James would have grown up to be a good boy. He'd have finished high school, gone off to college, gotten a job, and been happy.

And her own Electra complex would have been avoided _entirely_.

"Damn you," she told him, coldly.

As always, her father remained silent, oblivious, lost to whatever it was that took him, lost to limbo, to the continuous dream that was his reality, now. She curled her lip angrily, pulling her fingers away from him and flopping down in the chair, huffing.

"You don't care," she said. "You left us."

He didn't answer her, his eyes still, closed.

_He will always regret leaving you_, Ariadne had said, in a dream.

She snorted, settling in the chair.

She wondered how her family was doing. They would have checked the apartment and the studio by now, eliminated a dozen other options. They were probably on their way to the clinic, drumming their fingers against steering wheels and armrests and windows.

Arthur was probably armed.

The room was warm. It was actually a nice place, if she overlooked the fact that it was her father comatose in the bed. The walls were blue, like the ocean, and the sunlight was clean and bright.

It was rather comfortable.

_Okay, _she told herself, scooting the chair closer to her sleeping father. _Here it goes, then. _She pulled the PASIV from the bag slung over her shoulder and set it on the floor. She knew she wouldn't be bothered for a while—the doctors and nurses didn't come in if there was a visitor, unless there was an emergency.

She pulled two needles from the silver case, one for her father, which slid easily into his paper veins, and the other for herself.

She rolled it in her fingers, watching it gleam in the dying light.

_Okay, Dad, I hope you're still in there_. And she plunged the needle into her skin and hit the button, leaning back.

The sun went black around the edges of her eyes and she closed them, the somnacin pumping sleep through her blood.

_I'm going to end this, _she murmured, to everyone and no one.

_If you can, _said a voice that sounded like her father's, and she slept.

_After the kingfisher's wing  
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still  
At the still point of the turning world._


	5. part v

**Inception Big_Bang.**

**Dedicated to paintedsongs, iheartfluffly, Molly, Sam, Crystal, and Jim. **

**Disclaimer: I do not own Inception or _Burnt Norton_. **

* * *

Part V

_Words move, music moves  
Only in time; but that which is only living  
Can only die._

* * *

One

_Words, after speech, reach  
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,  
Can words or music reach  
The stillness_

Phillipa is lying in a field. Grass tickles her legs and her face is crushing flowers—the smell floods her nose and she opens her eyes, blinking away petals.

"Fuck," she says, and promptly shuts them again, letting the sun dim.

Staggering to her feet, she blinks.

This is her world, her flowers stretching to forever under the blue blue sky, her clock tower rearing up not too far away.

It's not hard to figure out where she needs to go, even without her father looming over her shoulder. The clock tower is the only place she _can _go, really, unless she wants to shift the dream and forget what she came for.

_Not likely_, she thinks to herself, brushing petals off her white summer dress and wading through the tall, tickling grass.

It only takes a few minutes—seconds, up above—for her to get to the shade of the tower. The grass is much shorter around it, the flowers subdued, and the door is open, waiting.

She smiles a bit at it, thinking _subtle, Dad_, before stepping in. The stairs spiral up, just like she designed them, high and dusty, and this time her legs don't hurt and burn when she climbs them steadily.

She knows that, up above, Arthur could barge up into the room at any moment, decide to dive after her. And he would—they all would because they were stupid and stubborn and determined just like she was.

Maybe it ran in the business.

The stairs were dusty and golden with sunlight, and the trapdoor was already open, waiting. She climbs through it and she's not all that surprised to see her father standing there, by the clock-window, his face turned to deep shadow, tiger-striped with light.

"Phil," he says steadily.

"Dad." She's a little more out of breath than he is—all the goddamn stairs—but she's just as steady.

_Good, _she thinks. She can do this.

He might smile at her then (she can't see it, but she gets the feeling) and he steps to the side, letting sunlight flood around him.

"Come look," he says, and his eyes go gray in the light.

Phil does, then, goes to stand at the clock-window. The flowers and the fields roll and stretch forever, waving, a huge ocean of color and scent.

"It's beautiful," she says.

Dom comes to stand beside her then, and she won't lie and say that the heat of him, the familiarity just behind her shoulder, feels _good_, feels like a connection that's been missing for fourteen years and is suddenly _there _again.

He's got a PASIV in one hand, and he sets it on the floor with a hollow thunk, scattering golden dust.

Phillipa stares out the window, and out of the corner of her eye she notices that the clock is ticking towards three.

The cool metal of a needle slides against her wrist.

"Deeper?" Her father asks, and she gives a ghost of a grin.

"Deeper," she agrees, and he slips the needle in and she slides to the floor.

The clock strikes three.

* * *

The bell tones are deeper now, bouncing off stone instead of flowers. She's lying on something cold—cobblestones—instead of grass and she gets to her feet faster this time, brushing rock and dirt off her dress and hands.

The Gothic city bubbles into place, gargoyles springing from the ramparts, snarling, wings flared.

The light goes green and red and blue, stained by the glass windows, and she hears the fountain bubble, water dripping steadily from great stone jaws.

"Ariadne," says Dom, and he's beside her like he's always been, distant-eyed and broad-shouldered and tall, the light striping his face red and green and blue when he shifts.

"Yeah," Phil agrees. The gargoyles seem to be watching her with their cold eyes. She doesn't mind.

"Shall we?" He sweeps his hand down one of the side streets, where it's cold and darker, the light low and orange.

"Sure." Phil leads the way, shivering a bit. It's colder than she remembers, prickling down her skin, and she's still wearing the summer dress, the cotton too thin for this sort of thing.

_It better be warmer down in the next level. _

"Here?" She asks, pointing to the bench.

Dom tilts his head, squints. "Yeah," he says, and he sets the PASIV down.

One gargoyle isn't on a building—he's standing in the middle of the street, still, stone, his face wrinkled horribly, his wings straining to lift him up and away.

She looks at him, runs a hand down his frozen face.

"He looks sad," she says.

Her dad looks at the gargoyle strangely. "Doesn't he?" He says. "He's beautiful."

She starts, studies the statue closer.

"I've never thought of that before," she murmurs, and she smiles for real this time. "Beautiful," she says, tasting it.

The needle is pressed up against her wrist.

"Beautiful," Dom agrees, and he pushes it in.

The world goes dark.

* * *

This time, she wakes standing up, still in the loose white dress. It billows as wind twists at it, playfully, almost, and she blinks rapidly as the world swims into view.

It's Arthur's Victorian village, the houses close together and the clock tower right above her head. It's in the middle of striking three, the sound deep and powerful, vibrating her bones.

Phillipa looks around warily. Her father already has the PASIV open, lying on the ground.

The projections ignore him, going about their Victorian day dressed to the nines. She thinks that maybe she'd have liked to live in this period. Dreams were simpler then, weren't this thing she could touch and see and smell and _feel_, and there wasn't a need to grab the top resting in the little pouch.

"We don't need to stay," he says, a bit gentler than she's heard him.

Phil looks away from the milling people. "No," she agrees, and sits down heavily, the bell echoing in her bones.

She holds out her arm, and the needle is cold.

"Down," Dom says.

And she goes down.

* * *

This isn't a world she's seen before, but she likes it. She's underwater in a great big dome, staring out at the ocean.

Neon fish swim lazily past and seaweed tangles up and up the dome, turning patches of watery light greenish and mysterious.

A shark striped like a tiger swims past, grinning toothily, and she swears that it fucking _winks_ at her, beautiful and deadly, water slipping between its open jaws.

"This is nice," her father comments, squinting at the bright fish.

The water is deep azure, like the Mediterranean, and Phil imagines that it's warm. On impulse, she jams her hand through the bubble.

"_Car_eful," Dom hisses, reaching to stop her, but this is her dream, she's holding it back, and nothing rushes in but she can feel the water, warm like sunshine, and she laughs.

"Try it," she says. "Nothing bad will happen."

Hesitantly, he sticks his hand through the bubble to, and the look on his face is priceless. "Warm," he says.

She beams, proud, and rolls her eyes. "Warm," she agrees, and she barely notices when he slips the PASIV needle into her arm.

The last thing she sees is the tiger-striped shark grinning toothily, winking his cold eyes.

"Is this limbo?" She asks, when she opens her eyes again and she's standing in a room.

Dom Cobb shakes his head. "No. You'll know limbo when you get there."

The room is red. Deep red walls, vermilion couch, crimson carpet, red red red everywhere. And there's a shaking to it too, a slight tremor under her feet.

"But we're getting closer," she says, and her voice sounds muffled by all the red.

His eyes are very blue when he nods. "Yeah. We're getting closer."

This time, she puts the needle in herself, and the carpet is warm and soft as she drifts, and the world drops away.

* * *

There's even more shaking.

Her mind supplies a Third World village, thatched huts and muddy streets and flies buzzing and flitting around her head.

The shaking is closer, vibrating, making it hard to stand.

"What's happening?" She asks, nervous now.

"Dreams are more unstable the deeper you go." He offers her a needle and she takes it almost desperately. "Don't worry, Phil. We're close now."

She closes her eyes just as the earth groans.

* * *

It's fucking _hot._ So hot Phil can imagine the skin peeling from her bones, shriveling and blackening like the eggs Arthur tries to make.

She's lying on a rock and there's heat _everywhere_, in the dry, scorched air, and breathing makes her lungs feel like it will crack.

The earth is shaking so hard Phillipa can't do anything but cling to the hot rock, fingernails scrabbling for a hold.

"Easy," says her father.

She looks at him and there's orange-red firelight around him, seeping from the rock itself. Her skin is blistering.

"Almost there," he says gently, and her hands are sweaty and burning and useless and he slides the needle in for her.

It's almost like relief, because she's on fire, and as her eyes go dim, she thinks that he might be too.

There's a deep growling sound and liquid fire sprays high into the air—Dom cries out, flings himself above her, heat shatters the rock around her, too hot, too much, too much—

Her eyes fall shut, and the world comes crashing to a stop.

* * *

She opens her eyes to water.

* * *

Two

_Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,  
Not that only, but the co-existence,  
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,  
And the end and the beginning were always there  
Before the beginning and after the end._

Ocean water, salty, bitter, floods her mouth. She kicks out instinctively, struggling for land, for something under her feet, and another wave tears over her and she's drowning.

There's no one around to pull her out and she kicks, childhood swimming lessons taking over.

The water feels heavy, and Phillipa claws her way up, swallowing salt and seawater, lungs burning.

She breaks the surface, sucking in air and coughing out water, wading as waves push her up, crest over her head.

This ocean, unlike the one is Jefferson's dream, is violent. As she drags herself towards the dark blur of the shore it tears at her, foaming and gurgling angrily. It sucks at her white dress and it throws itself at her shoulders, nearly dragging her under with its violence.

She can stand up, mostly. The sand is slick beneath her feet, shifting, pulled forward and back, forward and back with the tide.

By the time she makes it to the beach, Phil's already shaking and tired. The water swirls around her ankles hungrily, dangerously.

_There's nothing here, _is her first thought when she safely out of the ocean, wringing salt and seawater from her hair.

The beach is empty—dark and stretching for miles, bare and lonely and sad. The sea pounds at it relentlessly, furiously, as if to tear away the sand itself and leave only the gleaming rock.

"Hello?" Phillipa shouts, cupping her hands around her mouth. Her voice echoes, fades down the beach.

No one answers.

"Dad?" She calls.

He doesn't answer or appear. Nervous now, she grips the top in its pouch, grateful that it wasn't swallowed by the sea.

"Hello!" She tries one more time. There's no answer.

_Where are all the projections?_

None of the manifestations show up either, so Phil sighs, shoving down her nerves, thinking _of course this has to be bizarre _and starting to walk down the abandoned, lonely beach.

She's not wearing sandles. The sand is slick and cool between her toes, unlike the fire-hot dream, and she leaves footprints behind as she walks next to the surf.

The angry waves rush and swallow them up, erasing them viciously. She doesn't mind. She doesn't particularly need them anyway.

The sun is cold. It's bright, but it's high in the sky and far away, a tiny prick of yellow against the impassive sky.

Phillipa walks for hours.

The beach stretches on forever, endless sand slipping and sliding into the water.

She's fucking _tired. _Her fight to get to land wore her out and walking certainly isn't making the situation any better, and she feels so _drained _she can barely keep going.

The last month—James, Jefferson, dreaming, _all _of it—is heavy on her shoulders, dragging in her feet.

She feels _old_, and she's only been in limbo for a few hours.

_Where are you, Dad? _She thinks, a little desperately. _I need to find you. _

And that's when the dream changes.

It doesn't do it like a regular dream—she can feel that shift, feel the dream squirm, the fabric of it wrinkle—and this is nothing like that.

One second, it's just her and the beach and the waves. And the next, there's a boat.

It's a tiny little rowboat, the wood gray with age. It sits half in and half out of the ocean, bobbing a bit in the front, threatening to drift away.

Phil stares at it for a few good seconds. She didn't _feel _it, it just _happened. _It wasn't there and then it was.

_Damn_, she thinks, and closes her eyes briefly, testing something. _I want tea. _

When she opens her eyes there's a glass table sitting in the sand next to her with a tall glass of icead tea resting innocently on top.

_Well shit. _

She realizes then that limbo must not work like the other dreams. It's much, much easier to create, to form, and that _scares _Phil.

She doesn't drink the tea. She's afraid it will taste too close to the real thing.

_This is insane. _

"Dad!" She shouts, one last time, and the sound peals away and is drowned by the ocean. "Where are you?"

Her eyes fall on the boat. It bobs up and down, slipping further and further into the ocean as the waves tug it out.

There's nothing else around, just the small rowboat. Her mind is trying to tell her something, then.

"Will you take me to him? Phil asks the boat, half-expecting it to answer back.

Fortunately for her already fragile grip on sanity, it doesn't.

"Okay," she says, and she curls her fingers around the pouch, feeling the hard edges of her parents' top dig into the skin.

Phillipa climbs into the boat slowly, cautiously, and the waves roar louder than ever, slaming into the shore and pulling the boat free.

She sits down because she doesn't want to fall and it drifts out, almost of its own power—and as soon as she thinks that the boat definitely moves by itself, cutting a clear, steady path through the water.

The waves slop up over the the sides but there's no water in the bottom. It seems to sink through the wood and back into the ocean, leaving the boat dry and floating.

_Okay,_ she thinks, swaying from side to side with the boat and the waves. _Let's find Dad. _

The boat seems to know where its going—her subconscious knows, then. That's good. It sails steadily away until the beach is a dark line on the horizon, then a dot, then a speck, then gone.

The ocean is less violent out in the open water, away from the beach. It laps at the sides of the boats but doesn't slosh or surge or threaten.

It's almost peaceful.

Phil drifts for hours—days, maybe—until the sky darkens and the sea turns black.

Just like the sun, the moon is far away and cold, and when the water occasionally slops over the side it's icy on her skin.

_I wish I had a blanket, _she thinks, and then one is there, soft and warm and comfortable.

She wraps it around herself and soft of lies down, curling into a neat ball. She's tired, and the boat knows where it's going.

She only means to catnap, to doze for a bit, but she's exhausted.

Phil closes her eyes for a second and drops into the dreamless sleep of the dead.

* * *

She wakes up when the rowboat flips. A particularly powerful wave roars up, brings several thousand gallons of water smashing onto the faded wood, and the boat flips.

It flips like a fucking catapult.

The impact jars her awake and water floods her mouth and she lashes out, startled, instinctively struggling towards the surface.

She doesn't have much time to look at the world around her—the sky is brilliant with sun and the water has gone brown with sand—before she heaves, choking, water gurgling in her lungs.

Another wave rushes over her head, forcing her down again.

But this time, there are people. Hands grab Phil, pull her up and away. Soon she feels slippery sand beneath her feet and water pooling around her knees while waves break over her shoulders and drip down her face.

"Are you okay, miss?" The owner of the hands asks. Red shorts connected to tan legs and a ten muscled stomach tell her that the owner is a lifeguard.

_People. _

Phil's too busy hacking up half the ocean to answer right away, though. The salt stings her eyes and makes her mouth tingle unpleasantly.

"Easy," says the lifeguard. "You're okay now, miss."

The waves lap at her heels as she staggers, water-logged, to the beach.

"Paul!" The lifeguard bellows.

More hands tilt Phil's head up, pound her back.

After several seconds of intense pounding and coughing, she can breathe again. "'m okay," she gasps.

"What happened?" As her vision clears, the lifeguard stops blurring—strong face, bright eyes, easy smile, the stereotypical lifeguard.

"Boat flipped," she says, still retching a bit. "Big wave."

"We've had a problem with that," the lifeguard says, not unkindly. The other one, Paul, nods sagely. "You're lucky you were close to shore. Any farther out and you might have drowned."

She smiles weakly at him. _I wouldn't have died, really. _"Thank you," she says sincerely. He seems like a nice enough projection.

"Do you need anything?"

An idea forms in her oxygen-starved brain. "Oh no," she gasps, and lets fake tears collect in her eyes. "My bag was in the boat with me! It had my wallet! How am I going to get home?"

The lifeguard pats her shoulder sympathetically. "Don't worry," he says. "Come with me. We'll call your parents." He pulls her towards the lifeguard station before she can protest.

Phil sees _Public of Los Angeles_ stamped on the side of a nearby trashcan and her heart does a thing that has nothing to do with her almost-death a few minutes ago.

She's home.

This is limbo, her father's limbo, she's sure of it. Where else could he be? She wonders if he's still in their old house.

The lifeguard hands her the phone expectantly, and reluctantly she takes it, not sure if this was going to work.

She punches in her old home number and lets it ring. And ring. And ring. And—

"Hello?" A sharp, professional female voice cuts smoothly in. Phillipa jumps a bit, startled. "Hello?"

"Um, hi," she says. "I'm calling for Dom Cobb?"

There's a brief pause. "Oh, Emma!" The woman says happily. "I forgot you were coming to visit today—where are you?"

"The beach," she says vaguely, because she's a little confused and not sure where exactly she is. "I need a cab?"

"Of course, of course," says the woman. "Oh he'll be so glad to see you, Emma, he just gets so lonely, you know."

"Yeah," Phil agrees, even though she really doesn't.

"I'll have a cab come pick you up. See you in a few minutes, dear." The woman ends the call with a click.

Phil stares at the phone for a minute, trying to reorient herself. Apparently she's Emma, now. She grabs the top reflexively, feeling its hard edges.

"Okay," says the lifeguard cheerfully. "Go home and get some rest. And be careful next time!"

"There won't be a next time," she assures him. "Once was enough for me."

He laughs, pats her on the shoulder.

She steps back out into the blinding sun, squinting. The sand is whiter than it is in L.A and the people calmer, but other than that it's a damn good replica. She swallows and wonders if this is how people get lost.

The sun is hot under her feet, coarse and grainy. The beach smells like a beach—suntan lotion, pizza, bird shit, salt. There's a bit of a breeze that tickles the hairs on the back of her neck.

A cab pulls up the edge of the sand, honks. It's for her.

Breathing deeply, painfully aware of the fact that she's soaked and salty and bedraggled, Phil walks to it, throws the door open.

"Where to, miss?" The cabbie asks, bored.

She closes her eyes.

"529 Walton Drive."

* * *

Three

_Words strain,  
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,  
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,  
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,  
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices  
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,  
Always assail them._

She's standing in her old neighborhood in L.A. It's like she remembers—there's Mr. Andrews' tree with the tire swing, and Ms. Mary's flowers, and the Chong's Zen garden. On the corner is Billy's house—he was Phil's age an he had a cute dog named Puddles—and next to it is Ava Greene's. There's the stump that James tripped over and broke his wrist and the brick that Billy knocked Phil onto once, the brick that gashed up her arm.

And there's the creek that they caught fish in, and the field where they chased butterflies, and the track of dirt path where Jim, at fourteen, took Grandpa's car and nearly wrecked it into a tree.

It's so damn familiar she can't breathe.

Memory, strong, rushes over her like the ocean and in this second Phil understands why the others, why fearless Arthur and Eames and Ariadne and Saito and Yusuf are afraid of this place. It's _real_—twice as real as any other dream, three times, four.

This is almost reality, and it's only the slightly unbalanced weight of the top, its edges digging deep deep into her palm, that convinces her otherwise.

_In_, she thinks, and breathes. _Out. In. Out. _

The air smells like salt and seawater.

Her house is in the corner. Her backyard was bigger than the others, her house low and large. It's a nice neighborhood, a good place, and it feels so familiar, as she walks down the street for the thousandth time. The sidewalk doesn't feel the same, though. There aren't cracks in the right places and she doesn't trip in front of Ms. Mary's house like she would if she really was at home.

This place looks like the real thing, feels like the real thing, but it's lacking that _spark_, and that's good. This is limbo, her father's imperfect recollection of a world he hasn't seen in sixteen years.

529 Walton Drive hasn't changed at all, in Dom Cobb's limbo. It's still wooden and classy and gorgeous, with trees in the yard and wide open space behind it.

Phil's legs feel like jelly as she walks up the familiar steps, stands on the familiar porch.

The doorbell even has the same ring, _dong, dong, dong¸_ like a clock striking three. She rings it and waits.

Almost immediately, a short, stout woman opens the door with a sweep and beams at Phillipa, taking no notice of her still-damp clothes and tangled hair.

"Emma," she says warmly. "I'm so glad you made it today."

Phil smiles and nods because that feels like the right thing to do. "It's nice to see you again," she replies politely, and the woman ushers her in, shutting the door loudly.

"Dominic!" She bawls, down the hallway that it dotted with squares of light and that has pictures marching down the wall. "Dominic, your granddaughter is here to see you!"

_Granddaughter? _She thinks. _I'm his daughter. _

"I'm coming!" A definitely male voice shouts back, thinner and more wobbly than the woman's but still vivacious.

"Come faster, before she dies of old age!"

"Quit rushing me, Heather!" The voice gets closer and a stooped old man limbs into view, leaning on a cane.

Phil stares.

It's hard to recognize him—even the shriveled, hollow man lying on the hospital bed doesn't look anything like this man.

He's _ancient_, ninety at least, his face crumpled and white like paper. His hair has gone from gray to the color of snow and it's wispier, sticking up in several directions. His hands are knarled, his fingers knobby, veined heavily and liver-spotted. He's considerably shorter, too, but that's probably the stoop he's got because he's tilted to the side to take the weight of one of his legs.

The worst and most noticeable thing about him is his eyes.

The blue that his son shares is gone, replaced by a milky, pupil-graying fog.

Dom Cobb is blind.

Heather smiles indulgently at the old man and Phil stares some more trying to reconcile her father who was young and strong with her father who was wrinkled and shriveled and, by the looks of it, not far from death.

"Emma?" He asks, and he turns his blind face in her direction.

She opens her mouth but no sound comes out—he frowns a bit, confused. She tries again. "Hi," she manages, and his whole face lights up.

"Emma!" He stumps to her, moving rather well for a blind, ancient man, and fumbles a bit before drawing her into a clumsy hug.

She returns it gingerly, mind numb with shock.

This man is her father.

This is Dom Cobb the dreamer, the Architect, the Extractor, the teacher and student and runner.

He's still alive, here in limbo.

_He's alive_.

"So what bring you here?" He asks in his old wavering voice.

She can't look at his face. "Just wanted to see you," she says, lowly, and this time her eyes glitter with real tears. "I missed you."

The smile he gives her hurts. "You know me," he says, and she wants to tell that no, she doesn't, not at all. "I'm happy to be with you, any time you need me."

_You weren't there! _She wants to scream. _You weren't there when I needed you, you were here!_

"Can we sit?" He asks, leaning on his cane and tilting his head at her, blind eyes squinting. "I know you like the loveseat…"

"Um, sure." Phillipa's mostly functioning automatically, her mind colored with anger and shock and pain.

He limps through the house with her tailing behind, and she takes everything in and her hurt grows. The house is largely as she remembers, with the same kitchen, same stairs, same paint. The same view out the back door and the same carpet on the living room floor.

It's the same.

He's been living here comfortably all this time while his kids needed him, while they grew up without him.

He collapses heavily into one of two loveseats, his blind eyes focused on her forehead expectantly.

Gingerly, she sits down and looks around the living room.

He doesn't have a TV—she supposes that to a blind man it's pretty useless. He doesn't have any paper books, either, but there's some kind of electronic reader or tablet on the couch. There are lots of CDs, though, and a stereo and what might be an iPod of some sort docked in an iHome.

And there are pictures lining the room, starting with Dom and Mal. They smile for the camera, delighted, just children themselves, really. Phil follows their lives on the wall. They seem to date, then get married, and go on wild adventure. There's a bump in Mal's stomach that's her, and then Phil joins the pictures as a baby. There's a few of them as a family of three, then there's James.

Then Dom and Mal disappear.

The next several are all of James and Phillipa as young kids, occasionally with Grand-mère or Grandpa or Uncle Arthur.

And then Dom is there again. He rejoins the photos when Phil is about six, and he's got a tired smile on his face and Jimmy under one arm and Phil under the other. The quality sucks but there's genuine happiness on his face, and she realizes that this is, for him, when he returned to them.

After that, he's in a lot of the pictures. James and Phil grow up completely different lives. There's one of her on a horse and him with another boy. She never gets in to painting; instead there's a photo of her with a camera, grinning triumphantly.

In this picture when she graduates she is wearing yellow, not green, and her first car is a red Mini Cooper. She grows older than she is now.

Soon, there's a man sharing her pictures. He's got a wide, honest face and brown eyes and dark hair that's ruffled just enough to make him look cute. He has an arm slung over her shoulder easily, hugging her close.

In that picture she's maybe twenty-five.

And then she gets married. Her wedding dress is white and simple and the man is nervous. There's another photo of her and Dom. He's holding her arm—_about to give me away, _she realizes with a painful jolt.

Then there is a photo of the man and her father and herself, and there's a tiny little blue bundle wriggling in her arms.

A son.

In limbo, she had a son.

And a daughter, soon after.

Those children feature most often after that, growing up from tiny babies to young adults, healthy and happy and beautiful.

The boy looks like his father.

The girl (Emma, that has to be her name) looks like Phil.

Phillipa stares at the room full of pictures and she can't breathe. All of this, this is the life she could have had with her father, the life she _should _have had.

In this life, this frozen, frame-by-frame existence, she had been happy. She'd grown up with a dad. She'd loved him, and had gotten married and had kids.

Something like a sob and a laugh splashes from her throat.

"What's wrong?" Her father tilts his head towards her sharply, sightless eyes narrowing thoughtfully. "You're crying."

She can't answer him for several long, long minutes as the sobs heave themselves out of her chest, splatter wetly onto the damn carpet.

She can't look at the pictures anymore.

"The pictures," she says helplessly, and she cries some more.

Dom is silent for a long time, until her sobs turn to sniffles, which turn to great gulps of air. "You've never cried before," he murmurs, and the sunlight casts deep shadows into his wrinkles. "You've been here a hundred times, Em. Did something happen?"

There's genuine concern for her—for Emma—in his voice and it makes her want to laugh because Emma's not real.

"I learned some things," she says instead, sharp and harsh and ragged. Her eyes hurt. "About you and Grandma."

The old man's face deepens. "Mal, you mean." He is measured and even and ancient. He looks fragile, but she thinks he might be strong.

"Yes."

He leans back in his chair and old sorrow twists itself into his shoulders.

"Mal," he says softly, "was the love of my life. I didn't kill her."

Phillipa blinks, startled. "I know," she tells him before she can stop it. "I know you didn't. She killed herself."

He snaps his head around to look—well, point his face—at her. "Yes," he says. "But how did you know that? I told your mother that it was an accident."

"She's not stupid, _Grandpa_." Bitterness that she's carried for fourteen years slips into her voice. "She figured it out."

He is still and quiet.

"So you know," he says. "You know what happened?"

"_Yes_." She is almost violently angry—she remembers the oceans of limbo and their violence, and she feels it coursing in her blood—and suddenly she wants nothing more than to _hurt _this man, to make him feel what she felt for _sixteen years of her life._

"You left her, when Mal died. _You left her_. How do you think she felt about that, huh, Da—Grandpa?"

Dom Cobb looks away again, his eyes foggy, blurry.

"Look at me!" She snaps then. "Look at me! You left! What kind of father are you, huh? What if she had needed you? What if she missed you? What if she cried herself to sleep every night, praying for her dad to come home and he _never did?_"

He looks at Phillipa then, as best as he can.

His hands are shaking, and she hardens her heart because fuck she's getting rid of this, she's purging him from her mind with this, with this scalding thing swelling in her chest. (She remembers the fire-dream. This is what it means, this thing that hurts and burns.)

"I didn't want to leave," he says lowly, and that's the only thing that stops her. She can't help but think about Ariadne in the Gothic city, saying _he wanted to come back to you_. "I didn't."

"But you did."

He spreads his shaking hands appealingly, pleadingly. "I know," he gasps, and he might be crying except she can't see any tears. "I had to, the police were going to take your mother and James from me."

"What do you mean?"

"Mal told the police that she was afraid of me, that I would hurt her, hurt them. So they wanted to take them when she died, and I couldn't let them—I could _never _let them."

"So you took yourself away," she says, and she's lost her initial bite but the hot thing in her chest is still there. "You left."

"I came back," Dom murmurs. "I came back."

_No! _she wants to scream. _No you didn't no never no you stayed _gone _you bastard. _

She has the right to yell. She's his goddamn _daughter_, she has the right to be angry, to hurt this bad.

She looks at the pictures on the wall for strength, and the sight of the life she could have had makes the fire swell.

"You hurt her," she says icily. "You ruined her." _Me. _

He shakes his old head empathetically, white hair flying. "No," he says miserably. "She's stronger than that. My daughter—she was angry with me for a long, long time, but she's _stronger _than that, strong enough to—"

"Forgive you? Act like it never happened?" Her own harshness stabs at him viciously, the fire in her chest demanding blood, retribution.

He laughs then, a wild sound, old and sharp and wounded. "No, Phillipa never forgave me, never forgot what I did."

"What, then? How did she _live like that?_" In her anger she gestures at the pictures. He can't see it but he seems to know what she means.

"I don't know!" He bellows then, and smashes his old hand against the armrest of the chair. "I don't know, Emma."

She glares, her chest heaving, hurting. "It's terrible," she begins, in a voice that shakes as much as his does. "What you did."

"It was for them." He closes his eyes then, tired, ancient. "I left so they could be—happy, I guess, safe, not in foster care."

"Lie." She says.

"Perhaps." He looks very, very vulnerable. "But when I was gone, the one thing I wanted most was to be with them. You have to believe me, Emma, I did not want to go. I called them as often as I could, I sent presents, I—"

"It takes more than the occasional stuffed animal to convince kids they still have a father," she snaps, mostly out of burning, bitter anger.

He flinches like she's burned him.

"Yeah," he finally agrees. "It does. Is that why you came today, Emma, to remind me what I did wrong?"

_Yes, _she wants to say, _I did. _"No."

"Then why?"

She swallows a bit and the fire in her chest dims, just a little. "To see you. To try and make sense of all this."

He leans back in his chair then, loose and tired and old. "Have you made sense of it?" He sounds hollow.

She looks at the pictures again, lining his walls.

_He can't see, but he keeps them. _

"Not really."

_He keeps them because they're important to him. _

He sighs. "I'm truly sorry," he tells her. "I am. I didn't want to leave my children. I love them."

_He keeps their pictures, their lives, on his walls. _

She is silent.

"I came back for them," he says strongly. "I came back to be with them."

_No you didn't!_

"And I raised my grandchildren." Pride makes him tilt his head up now. "You and your brother and your cousins. I stayed for you. I stayed in this house so you would always know where to find me."

She stares at him. "You stayed for us?"

He nods gravely, and his hands shake and his lips quiver. "I stayed," he says. "I can't turn a corner without a memory, but I _stayed_."

"For us."

"For you."

Phillipa is shaking.

It starts deep in her bones, vibrating outwards, to her organs and her muscles and her skin, and she sits in her old home and shakes.

She's crying again.

"I was so lonely," she murmurs, very very softly. "I missed you so fucking much, Dad."

"I'm sorry," Dom Cobb says, not to Phillipa but to Emma. "I'm so sorry I hurt you, and your mom."

She sits in the chair and cries. For a minute, he hovers in his chair, nervous, unsure. Then he stands, stiffly makes his way to her.

"I'm sorry."

The photographs on the wall are of her, and what she could have been. But they're blurry with dream—they're not real. The ocean is not real. The fire-dream isn't real.

But the old man who almost timidly wraps his arms around her, smelling like salt and seawater, _he _is real.

He's her father.

She loves him.

And for the first time in sixteen years, Phillipa Cobb collapses into her father's arms and cries.

* * *

Four

_The detail of the pattern is movement,  
As in the figure of the ten stairs.  
Desire itself is movement  
Not in itself desirable;_

She opened her eyes.

The sounds of the hospital room were unnatural, loud, echoing—instinctively she curled up into a ball in the chair, trying to block it out.

There was a hand on her shoulder that prevented that.

"Phillipa," Arthur said sternly, and reluctantly she opened her eyes.

The room, cool blue in dimming light, swam into view.

The PASIV was gone and the room was full to bursting. Arthur was the closest, crouched in front of her, his dark eyes worried and serious. James was right behind him, peering at his big sister anxiously, wringing his hands. Eames and Ariadne were on the other side of the bed and Saito and Yusuf were by the door, watching her with the same concern in their eyes.

"Are you alright?" Arthur's voice was soft and fatherly, almost. He ran a hand through her hand and she noticed, gleeful, that it wasn't terribly tangled and it didn't smell like the ocean.

"Yeah," she said. Her voice sounded like sandpaper. "I think so."

She shifts, tries to stand up gingerly. The dream was heavy in her bones, slowing her down, pulling, pulling.

"Careful." James is at her elbow, his bright blue eyes worried. "You were under for a long time."

"Five hours," Yusuf pipes up by the door. "You're lucky the sedative wore off! You could have fallen into limbo!"

She laughs hoarsely. "I did fall into limbo."

Arthur chokes. "What!"

She smiles at him. "I went into limbo," she said. "To talk to Dad."

"Did you?" There was more curiosity in James' eyes than worry now.

"Yeah, I did."

"What did he say?"

She smiled then, big and wide. "That he was sorry."

For a second, everyone stared.

"He's sorry?" James asked. "What for?"

"For leaving us," she said softly. "Down there, he watched us grow up, Jim. Well, his projections of us—he loves them. Us."

James turned and looked steadily out the window. "When Uncle Arthur's done lecturing," he said quietly. "You and I are going out for coffee. We're going to sit down and talk."

"Did the inception work? Are the charges being dropped against you?"

"The police were notified about ten minutes ago," Saito rumbled, waving his BlackBerry. "James Cobb is a free man."

"And we're going to spend more time together." The younger man promised.

"You can go back to school on Monday," Ariadne added. "We had them—Saito had them, really, with a shitload of cash—let you back in."

"Now," Arthur cut in sharply. "_What _were you thinking, Pippa? Running off on us? We woke up and you were _gone_, do you have any idea how worried we were?"

"Arthur darling nearly had a coronary," Eames said, throwing a lazy arm around his lover's shoulders. "Almost called the paramedics." He winked and kissed Phillipa on the head. "Glad you're alright, pet. I'd hate to go and find a new niece."

Arthur glared fiercely. "Never," he ordered lowly, in his dangerous voice. "Do anything like that again, Phillipa Cobb, or I swear I'm going to lock you up and never let you out again."

"Uncle Arthur," Phil said carefully. "I love you too." She hugged him, hard, and he _oofed _and patted her back, clearing his throat.

"Never again," he murmured into her ear. "You let this go, do you understand? Just let him die in peace now."

She looked up at him, at his eyes hidden behind the lens, his lined, serene face. Phillipa smiled. "I'm okay now," she said. "Dad and I, we're okay now."

"Good." He hugged her tightly. "I was worried, Pippa."

She smiled into his shoulder. "I know. Sorry about that."

He snorted. "No you're not. You'd do it again if you had too, don't even tell me you wouldn't. You get that from your father."

She pulled back, grabbed Jim by the shoulders and tugged him close. "Why don't we all get some coffee," she said to the entire room, looking at Arthur steadily. "I want you to tell me about my dad."

"Can we make it a bar?" Eames asked hopefully. Arthur kicked him in the ankle and Ariadne giggled.

"Coffee it is," said Arthur.

"I am _not _cramming myself into your little car," James warned, leaning into Phil. "Not again."

"You fit everyone in the Prius?"

"Barely."

"Do not worry—a limousine is coming to collect us."

"Jesus, Saito, please tell me you didn't by a limo company."

"Of course not. I already owned this one."

"Is there alcohol in it?"

"Eames!"

"Darling!"

Phillipa smiled at them, at her hodge-podge family, and gave James a squeeze. He laughed and rolled his eyes.

"Family," he mouthed, and she grinned.

Family.

They made there way to the door. Phillipa was the last one out and she turned, for half a second, to look back.

Dominic Cobb lay still on the hospital bed, tired and old and pale.

In his mind, he was ninety-seven, and the last sixty years had been a mix of too fast and too slow, and he thinks that maybe it's time. He's blind but he looks out the window anyway, walking around his living room, tracing pictures with his fingers.

This is his life. His son, his daughter, his grandchildren. He loves them.

She stood at the door and gazed at the still body of her father, and the fire in her chest was gone. She wouldn't forgive him, or forget. She couldn't—sixteen years of her life had been shaped by his disappearance. It was too much time.

But she could move on. She could leave this behind, like a child outgrowing a toy. She would.

She smiled gently. Arthur and Eames were arguing again, Saito was speaking on his phone, Yusuf and Ariadne had captured James' attention with something.

It was time to go.

Still smiling, she reached into her pocket and took out the tiny top, rolling it between her fingers. She looked at it, hard, at the edges and the dulling metal, bounced it in her hand.

And then Phillipa Cobb gently tossed the pewter top back into the room and walked away. She only looked back once.

_I wonder, _she thought to herself, _if I can find a good cup of tea somewhere. _

The door to Room 307 slid shut with a final _click_. Walking down the hallway, arm in arm with her aunt and her brother, Phil heard it and smiled.

It was time to go, and she went.

_Love is itself unmoving,  
Only the cause and end of movement,  
Timeless, and undesiring  
Except in the aspect of time_


	6. epilogue

**Inception Big_Bang**

**Dedicated to paintedsongs, iheartfluffy, Molly, Sam, Crystal, and Jim. This chapter is for Jim. Te amo, Jim. :)**

**Disclaimer: Inception and _Burnt Norton _are not mine. **

* * *

Epilogue

He is ninety-seven. His life seems longer than that—he's been old twice now—and he's so very tired. He can't really get up today, no matter how Heather needles him. He's too tired.

It's time to go.

Dom Cobb is ninety-seven. Sometimes, the years had gone by like hours, so quick he couldn't keep them. Other times, a minute was a year, was a decade.

Time was warped for him, was a fickle, irritating thing.

But now it's time to go, and he relaxes into his pillows and smiles. He hopes Emma will be okay. She's a good girl. A little stubborn, a little wounded, but a good girl.

_Yes_, he thinks, as he starts to fade. _She'll be okay._

He closes his eyes.

The ocean laps around his house, already sensing that death and collapse and awakening is near. The sun is a ball of orange sinking low over the horizon, and to anyone looking, they would see, as the water rises gently, a woman standing on top of the waves, her black dress billowing around her like a breeze. Two little children play beside her, laughing and giggling and splashing in the water.

When he opens his eyes and his age falls away, the first thing he sees is them, standing on the water.

The children grin hugely and the woman smiles faintly, saying something he can't hear.

The children run to him, laughing, shrieking.

"_Dad_," they shout, joyous, and tangle his fingers with their little ones. "Dad, we waited for you!"

He smiles, gently, and follows them to the horizon, to the woman who is crying and laughing and kissing him.

It's time.

The sun slips below the horizon, and together, they fade away.

* * *

_Sudden in a shaft of sunlight  
Even while the dust moves  
There rises the hidden laughter  
Of children in the foliage  
Quick now, here, now, always—  
Ridiculous the waste sad time  
Stretching before and after._

_-T.S. Eliot, _Burnt Norton


End file.
